


baptism of fire

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2019 [2]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Apocalypse, Bunkers, Captivity, Childbirth, Claustrophobia, Complicated Relationships, Drama, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Family, Graphic Descriptions of Childbirth, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Pregnancy, Romance, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Suicide Attempt, Torture, Trapped, Unplanned Pregnancy, semi-graphic descriptions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-03-30 22:56:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19037215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: The Collapse starts sooner than expected, and Joey Hudson finds herself an unwitting resident of John Seed’s bunker for the next seven years.





	1. Chapter 1

Josephine Hudson’s life had become a blur of pain and terror.  
  
After the helicopter crash, after they dragged her out of the wreckage with Pratt and knocked her out, she woke up on the bank of a river with her hands bound in front of her. Pratt was kneeling beside her in the mud, hands similarly bound and dark blood seeping from a cut above his hairline. To her surprise, Burke was there too- they must have caught him in the forest. No sign of Whitehorse and Rook; everyone else there was a Peggie.  
  
“Joey?” Pratt whispered, looking completely fucking terrified. “Are you okay?”  
  
Hudson’s brain and mouth were disconnected, and she couldn’t respond.  
  
The Peggies hauled them up and dragged them into the river, where John Seed was waiting with his bible (or maybe it was the Book of Joseph). The river wasn’t deep enough or wide enough to be the Henbane; it looked maybe a little more like the river that ran along the southern edge of the valley, but Hudson couldn’t see any landmarks to confirm it. God, they’d been captured by hostile Peggies and no one was around to hear them scream.  
  
John baptized them one by one: First Burke, who struggled and spat and had to be held in place by two Peggies- he was dunked into the water, then John spoke some mish-mash of Eden’s Gate-flavored bullshit over him, pressing his thumb to the Marshal’s forehead and ignoring the steady stream of curses spewing from him.  
  
“The Marshal will go with Faith,” Joseph declared from the shoreline. Hudson’s heart raced. They were being separated?  
  
Fuck, fuck, _fuck._  
  
Next was a considerably more subdued Pratt, who flinched away from John’s touch and spluttered and coughed after being dunked. “Deputy Pratt will go with Jacob,” Joseph declared, and Pratt was dragged back and shoved off towards the oldest Seed. He looked terrified, and Hudson could not blame him.  
  
Then it was her turn.  
  
John Seed had such blue, _blue_ eyes, and they almost glowed in the night as he locked gazes with her. Hudson didn’t speak, choosing to copy Pratt’s subdued silence instead of provoking the dangerous cultists the way Burke had. A single thought rotated through her mind as John baptized her:  
  
Three cops, three siblings.  
  
Burke with Faith, Pratt with Jacob, and where did that leave Hudson?  
  
“John,” Joseph said, confirming her suspicions with all the air of issuing a death sentence, “Deputy Hudson will go with you.”  
  
“Thank you, Joseph.”  
  
Those eyes locked with Hudson’s again. One of John’s hands came out to grasp her by the shoulder. “Come along, Deputy,” John said with a chilling smile. “We have somewhere we have to be.”  
  
The windows of John’s truck were tinted, and it was difficult for Hudson to tell where they were even once they were on the road, especially with people on either side of her. One of the Peggies drove, another sat in the driver’s seat, and John sat in the bench seat with her and an armed guard. Every bump of the truck on the road forced her shoulder to jostle his. But John made no mention of it, did not speak to her or threaten her or touch her any more than he could help: He just sat there, cool as the proverbial cucumber, a calm and vaguely triumphant smile on his lips.  
  
The sky was getting lighter. Hudson tried to narrow down the time: They’d gone to arrest Joseph around nine o’ clock last night, thinking the compound would be quieter and that they’d face less people, less resistance. Taking Joseph had taken less than half an hour, she couldn’t have been unconscious from the crash for more than a few minutes, she was knocked out and transported from the island to the river to be baptized… God. She must have been unconscious for a while after they’d knocked her out, if dawn was coming now.  
  
When the truck finally came to a stop, when they finally hauled her out, Hudson was surprised to find that they were at John’s ranch.  
  
If you’d asked Hudson beforehand what she thought the _purpose_ of this was, she’d have theorized that maybe John was going to lock her in a spare room and keep her prisoner there. Or maybe he was stopping here on business and meant to travel somewhere else. Or maybe he meant to shoot her in the back of the head and hang her body over his front door like some twisted fucking Christmas decoration. Anything was possible, because of all the Seed siblings John was the only one with a palpable reputation of being a temperamental lunatic.  
  
If you’d told her they were going to be shooting a fucking _commercial_ , however, Hudson would have laughed until she cried.  
  
“We are all sinners. Every one of us. You, me- even the Father knows… Deeply, of sin. It’s a poison that clouds our minds.”  
  
Oh fuck, oh fuck.  
  
The classic Queen lyrics blared in her head: _Is this the reeeeal life? Is it just faaantasy?_ This couldn’t be fuckin’ real. Twenty-four hours ago she’d been half awake and bitter about the fact that she’d woken up before her alarm had gone off, bitter about losing sleep before what was going to be a ruthlessly long day. Now she was the captive of a psychotic cult, bound and gagged as one of its leaders did a _commercial_ advertising- what- their services? Kidnapping and brainwashing?  
  
It would have been hilarious if she wasn’t so _fucking_ terrified that she was about to be executed on TV.  
  
“What if I told you that you could be free of sin? What if I told you that everything you ever dreamed could come true? What if I told you that everything could be overcome if you embraced… An idea? That freedom from sin can come from the power of just one word-”  
  
“ _YES!_ ” The crowd of Peggies cheered.  
  
If Hudson had never heard of Eden’s Gate before this very moment, _this_ would have been all she needed to see to know they were a cult.  
  
The Peggie at her side began to push her forward, towards John.  
  
Oh no. Oh, oh no.  
  
Hudson pictured John choking her, pictured him pulling out a gun and finishing off the video by planting a slug in her skull. She pictured him whipping out a knife, smooth and easy as you please, and slitting her throat so that the spray peppered the camera lens. There could be no other purpose for her presence in this circus.  
  
“ _Yes,_ I am a sinner.” John moved behind her and gripped her by the arms, pulling her slightly closer to him; she must have been out of frame. “ _Yes,_ I wish to be unburdened. _Yes_ , I must be…” One arm stayed wrapped around her shoulders, a parody of a friendly embrace: The other came up to touch her neck, the motion insisting that he intended to choke her, fingers spreading to encompass her throat… And then pulling back. The touch had been feather-light but still full of menace, of threat- but it felt less like an attempt to hurt her and more like an attempt to make a point to someone else. “… _redeemed._ ”  
  
Hudson waited for the knife, the gun, the sudden explosion of violence.  
  
It didn’t come.  
  
John stepped away from her, turning to face another camera.  
  
Hudson closed her eyes and kept them closed.  
  
“If you are watching this, know that you have been selected. You will be cleansed. You will confess your sins, and you will be offered atonement. Don’t worry! _You_ don’t have to do anything. We’ll come for you. Welcome, to Eden’s Gate.”  
  
A beat. And then a small explosion of conversation amongst the assembled cultists, suggesting that it was over. Hudson did not move and did not open her eyes; she spent that moment appreciating the lack of attention being paid to her, the lack of people touching her, and tried to immerse herself in it as though she could force time to stand still. As though she could indefinitely put off what was coming.  
  
“Did you get all of that, Deputy?”  
  
Hudson started, eyes flying open to see John standing before her, close enough that she could feel his breath on her face. She didn’t make any move to respond to him, and he sighed.  
  
“You will be cleansed,” He said, a softer and somehow more menacing rendition of what he’d done on camera, “You will confess your sins, and you will be given a chance for atonement.” John reached up, pushed a loose strand of hair out of Hudson’s face. “And then, God and The Father willing, you will march with us to Eden’s Gate.”  
  
The smile he gave her was at once sincere and malicious, and Hudson felt terror settle in her gut.  
  
[---]  
  
Hudson broke so fast.  
  
The knowledge that she had given in so quickly deepened the crack, widened a hairline fracture into an out-and-out break.  
  
“Go fuck yourself,” She’d said at the beginning, when he’d asked if she was ready to confess, when he’d strapped her into that chair in that room and she’d known with a raw, lizard-brain sort of sense that she was in very serious danger. Hudson intuited that telling him to go fuck himself would not be productive, that it might only make things worse, but she was not a woman inclined to rolling over so easily. She would not give this fucker the satisfaction of a quick, terrified confession, would not tickle his sadistic streak by pleading for mercy.  
  
“This is a safe-space,” John had told her, and Hudson almost cackled with the hilarity of it. “There is no judgment here. Do you wish for me to hear your confession?” He said it with all the calm, slightly condescending air of the youth pastors her mother had forced her to work with as a pre-teen. Fire boiled in her chest, hardened her resolve.  
  
“Go _fuck_ yourself.”  
  
“That’s not the magic word,” John had sang, smoothly picking an ice-pick off his work-table and twirling it between his fingers as he approached her. “Do you wish for me to hear your confession?” His tone was a little strained now, a warning: Further resistance would have consequences.  
  
This time, Hudson stayed silent.  
  
John sighed.  
  
It took all of forty-five minutes for her to break.  
  
Forty-five minutes of the ice-pick.  
  
Forty-five minutes of the pliers.  
  
Forty-five minutes of the hammer.  
  
Forty-five minutes for the obligatory pride to give way to self-preservation, to fear of what he’d do to her if she _really_ insisted on playing hardball.  
  
Hudson was a Sheriff’s Deputy in backwater Montana, USA. The most intense part of her career had been watching Danny get his guts blown out by those speeding assholes, and it was the first time a Hope County cop had been killed in the line of duty in almost thirty years. She was not James Bond, not some hardened agent trained to withstand having her fingernails pulled out; she was tougher than the average woman, but she was not invincible, even when her principles demanded she stand strong.  
  
She knew all this. She knew all this, and would _never_ have blamed anyone in her position for breaking down, but still the shame burned her from the inside out.  
  
“There, now,” John soothed, fingers sliding through her hair. “Was that so hard?”  
  
_Fuck you!_ Came the reflexive spurt of temper. But Hudson stuffed it down, fear stronger than anger for now.  
  
“To what sins do you confess?”  
  
Hudson hesitated. “What… What sort of things do you qualify as a sin?” John paused, and Hudson hoped he didn’t take the question as stalling, or as an attempt at playing around. He possessed exactly the sort of temper she’d expected to receive during the broadcast: He was the sort of man that could be smooth and calm one moment, only to turn around and bash her leg with a hammer the next. He knew exactly how to time his violence so that it was unexpected and therefore _infinitely_ more frightening. “I’m not religious, I don’t- I don’t really know what qualifies as a sin.” That was a lie- her mother had been very Christian, the daughter of a missionary- and Hudson knew damn well what traditional Christianity deemed sinful.  
  
“Hm…” John contemplated. “The seven deadly sins are Pride, Greed, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, Wrath, and Sloth. Consider their meanings, and search your heart.”  
  
Hudson almost blurted it out immediately, but caught herself- if John suspected, rightly or not, that she was lying, there would almost certainly be more pain in her future. After a moment or two she said, “I’ve, uh… I’ve, I’ve had sex before. Outside of marriage.”  
  
“Lust, then. How many times?”  
  
“I’m not sure.”  
  
“More than ten?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“More than twenty?”  
  
Hudson considered for a moment. “No.”  
  
“With how many people?”  
  
“About two or three.”  
  
“Do you have lustful thoughts about others?”  
  
“Occasionally.” Because it was _normal_ , Hudson thought with a little flare of irritation in her chest. It was normal, even fucking _scientific_ , behavior for someone to desire someone else sexually. God, if there was anything she’d hated when she was a kid and stuck under her mother’s religious teachings, it was how religion seemed to take normal human behavior and turn it into something dirty.  
  
“Would you say that Lust is a sin that dominates your life?”  
  
Hudson shook her head. “No.”  
  
John’s smile was thin, but pleased.  
  
“Well,” He said, squeezing her shoulder, “There are six others to consider.”  
  
And this became Hudson’s life for the next two weeks: Sessions in the chair with John, who was content to leave her unharmed as long as she answered his questions. Occasionally, sensing half-truths and resistance, he would casually pick a tool up off of his workbench and finger it warningly, signaling to Hudson that she ought to either genuinely start spilling her guts or make something convincing up. Sometimes she _did_ have to make things up. She almost got the feeling that John was waiting for her to confess to something really insane, like bathing in Yak’s blood and slamming rails of coke every Friday night. Was that the standard the other Peggies had set for confessions? Had many of them confessed to doing really _batshit_ things that led John to believe that there was at least one really big, crazy sin hiding somewhere inside her?  
  
It wouldn’t shock her.  
  
However fucked up she thought the Peggies were before, it was evident that they were even _worse_ in reality.  
  
Between the interrogation sessions, between John’s menacing presence and the constant, steady threat of harm if she failed to meet expectations, Hudson found herself with other captives facing what could only be described as the exact, literal opposite of the love-bombing that cults were so famous for luring people in with.  
  
“You are _sinners!_ ” A Peggie with wild, dark hair bellowed, aiming a kick at Hudson and catching her in the ribs. It was a tenuous trade: John’s violence was more inventive, more psychological, but sparing; and it could be staved off with a confession, false or not. The Peggies assigned to this abuse dealt their blunter violence out far more frequently, and there was no way to avoid it. “You are saved only by the Father and his mercy! Why can’t you see that?!”  
  
In the moments when the beatings slowed, when the Peggies had to catch their breaths, Hudson was able to confer all too briefly with the other captives: They whispered that the cult had completely taken Hope County, was occupying Fall’s End and had taken everyone they came across as hostages. Some were sent to John, others were sent to Jacob and Faith. The roads were all closed, and planes patrolled the skies; anti-aircraft guns dotted the mountains to stop anyone with a plane from leaving the valley. Hudson thought of Nick Rye and his pregnant wife and hoped to _fuck_ that they didn’t try to get out that way.  
  
Just over two weeks into her captivity, Joseph Seed appeared, watching from the door. The Peggies seemed to increase their fervor, eager to prove their devotion to Joseph and the Project. “Please!” A woman to Hudson’s right screamed, “Please! Please!” The others begged too. Hudson couldn’t tell what she screamed in her head and what actually made it out of her mouth; she was too busy shielding her head from the kicks and punches being aimed at it.  
  
Joseph watched for maybe five minutes, expression implacable.  
  
And then he walked away without a word.  
  
In that moment, Hudson hated Joseph Seed more than she ever had.  
  
The next day she was back in the chair, back in John’s interrogation room. For the first time, John did not bind her hands or legs: He let her sit freely in the chair. Maybe he’d figured out that _she’d_ figured out she couldn’t escape- or maybe it was because Hudson looked exactly like she felt: Like she’d been on the receiving end of an ass-kicking and that even if she _did_ make a break for it, she wouldn’t even be able to hobble to the door before he noticed.  
  
“Hm,” John muttered, pushing her braid aside and tugging lightly on the collar of her shirt to examine her shoulder. Hudson could feel a bruise starting there, and though she was at the wrong angle to see it, it felt really _bad_. The kind she’d have to see a doctor for in the normal world. “Does that hurt?”  
  
Hudson was vaguely incredulous. “Yes,” She said, struggling to keep her tone in check. _The fuck do you think it feels like?_  
  
John hummed again. Then he removed his hand and stepped away from her. “Let’s talk about _Envy_ , Deputy.”  
  
Hudson exhaled quietly. So far, John had determined that _Pride_ was the worst of her sins, but he seemed determined to work through them all before making a final decision. “Uh… I guess I envied-” Her voice caught; she was dancing close to the topic of Danny Forrester, her late partner, and she’d already told John more about Danny and his death than she wanted to. “-I envied Danny.” This was a half-truth: Hudson would use the word ‘admire’ under any other circumstance. She had never resented Danny for his good qualities, and there had been no malice in her wishing that she could be as cool under pressure as he was, or how he seemed to so seamlessly balance personal and professional life.  
  
But John wouldn’t buy that, so she had to play it up.  
  
“In what way did you envy him?”  
  
**_BOOM._**  
  
The room shook- far too violently for something so far below ground- and both of them looked up at the ceiling. John seemed rattled, uncertain- whatever was happening, he hadn’t been expecting it. He seemed to be reaching the same conclusion as Hudson: Whatever was happening, it was strong enough to rattle a bunker built deep into the earth, which suggested something big.  
  
And bad.  
  
John lowered his eyes to hers. “Wait here,” He ordered, casting a fleeting look to her unbound wrists and ankles. “Do not attempt to leave the room, or there will be consequences.” John left the room, and Hudson stayed frozen in her seat.  
  
_Consequences._  
  
She didn’t need an explanation. She’s already heard from some of the other prisoners about what John had done to them when they’d failed to break within the first forty-five minutes of their interrogation. One of the captured was an old Vietnam vet who had taken an unspeakable amount of abuse during the war, and he’d not been so easy to crack by “some Millennial cultist fuck-for-brains with a pig-sticker”. Hudson longed for his courage, but didn’t envy the vibrant burns along his arms, legs, and the side of his face.  
  
Hudson thought of him now and cursed her cowardice: She couldn’t seem to force her body from the chair, couldn’t work up the nerve to disobey the order and start looking for a way out. The bunker had so many doors, many of them sealed- but maybe she could hide and sneak out with time? There were nooks and crannies to hide in- but so many Peggies, so many people to catch her. This could be her chance, maybe someone was fighting back outside and assaulting the bunker- or maybe they weren’t. The possibilities were endless, enticing, but Hudson was halted by the sheer potential of the _retribution_ John would absolutely enact on her if he caught her. Hudson didn’t delude herself into thinking that John believed she was wholeheartedly buying into the Eden’s Gate hard-sell, but he would never leave her unbound again if she took this chance to escape.  
  
**_BOOM._**  
  
**_BOOM._**  
  
Hudson looked up at the ceiling, nervous. The sounds were a little further away than the first one had been, but the bunker still shook around her. The Peggies must be in chaos- filling the halls and getting ready for a fight. Surely there were better opportunities, she told herself. Surely there would be better chances to escape than right now.  
  
Hudson eyed the staircase at the corner of the room, sealed off by a grate. The ice-pick was still on the table, she could use it to pick the lock; or she could steal it, hide it on her person and try to stab John in the neck when he came back. If it were two weeks ago, if Hudson had woken up from that helicopter crash in this room, that would have been what she’d done: She’d have hid behind the door and waited for John to come, would have jammed it into his throat and killed him.  
  
But that was the Hudson of two weeks ago.  
  
The Hudson of now understood with terrible gravity what would become of her if she tried to escape and failed.  
  
The price outweighed the potential reward.  
  
And so Hudson waited: She stayed in the chair, anxious beyond measure. She continued to be drawn to the staircase, her fingers itched to pick up the ice-pick, tempted by how _easy_ it would be to just pick it up and try to hide it in her belt, or conceal it in the empty holster on her hip.  
  
But she didn’t.  
  
When the handle of the door creaked some minutes later- it could have been as much as an hour- Hudson was at once heartbroken and relieved: She’d lost her chance to escape, and she’d lost her chance to completely screw herself.  
  
John stepped into the room slowly, movements deliberate, expression solemn. “Deputy,” He greeted, and his voice was soft.  
  
Hudson stared at him, fingers clenched on her lap. “What happened?”  
  
John was silent; but then he motioned with his hand, beckoned her towards him. “Come with me.”  
  
Hudson went.  
  
It became increasingly obvious as they trekked through the bunker that the Peggies were in some state of distress: Some were screaming, some were crying, some were embracing, and others were on their knees praying. Hudson’s stomach rolled; had someone done something against the cult? Was she now about to face the backlash from it? Hudson envisioned another video, _this_ time ending with her being shot, or with her throat slit. At some point the throng of Peggies became thick; Hudson bumped against them and cringed when her injuries were aggravated. After nearly being separated by the crowd, John reached out to grab her hand. Hudson flinched away reflexively, and for a moment he was still- but then, with a deliberate but careful movement, he closed his fingers around her wrist. “This way,” John said, gently tugging her along.  
  
The crowd began to thin the closer they got to the door. Some of the Peggies scrambled when they saw John, apparently anticipating that they would be criticized or punished for shirking their duties. Hudson saw them whispering, saw them staring at her as John led her by. They looked at her with shock, with surprise and bewilderment- did they think John would have killed her by now? Were they surprised at how (she assumed) visibly injured she was? Or was it more that she had been released from her cell, unbound and with John?  
  
“John,” Hudson intoned as they approached the staircase, “What is it you’re going to show me?” She doubted he was bringing her up here to let her go free.  
  
John hesitated, and then took a deep breath.  
  
“The Father’s prophecy has been realized,” He said quietly, his grip on her hand tightening minutely. “The Collapse has come, and the world is being cleansed in fire as we speak.” Hudson didn’t speak; she was having trouble breathing. Either John had finally lost the last few screws holding him together, or something really, _really_ bad had happened. “Come and see.”  
  
He led her to the door, let Hudson step ahead of him so that she could look out the small, heavily-reinforced window that sat at eye-level in the steel. She hesitated, shaking slightly- it sounded like there was some sort of storm going on outside- and then she looked.  
  
“Holy _shit_.”  
  
John was telling the truth.  
  
The forest outside was in flames. Dark clouds of smoke and debris swirled through the air, and a pack of deer went charging recklessly, helplessly through the burning trees and underbrush. “A- A wildfire?” Hudson choked, unable to formulate her question more coherently. _Please be a wildfire_. _Please be something that clears up in a week or two. Please let it be that Sharky Boshaw went to town with that fucking flamethrower of his and set the county on fire. Please let them be misinterpreting this._  
  
“The sounds you heard before,” John said from behind her, “Were bombs. _Nuclear_ bombs. The guards outside saw the mushroom clouds.” A pause. “This is the Collapse, Deputy. The end of modern civilization. Joseph’s prophecy has been fulfilled, and God is cleansing the Earth. And when seven years have passed, we will emerge from the bunkers and march to Eden’s Gate.”  
  
_Seven years._  
  
Outside, the world collapsed.  
  
And inside the bunker, so did Hudson.  
  
[---]  
  
When Hudson woke, she was in a bed.  
  
For a few sleepy moments, she groggily recalled her last conscious moments as a particularly vivid nightmare.  
  
And then she remembered that it was real.  
  
Hudson snapped awake and lurched out of the bed- and then was immediately overcome with dizziness, her legs shaking violently under her weight.  
  
“Easy!” John Seed was suddenly beside her, and Hudson collapsed back onto the bed in her panicked attempt to put space between them. “I caught you before you could hit your head, but you’re probably still in shock.”  
  
“ _Probably?_ ” Hudson snapped, her fear of John temporarily overridden by- you know- _the end of the world._  
  
“Alright, _definitely_ in shock,” John muttered, sitting down beside her on the bed.  
  
For the first time since entering the bunker, Hudson realized that everything was surprisingly quiet. She looked around the room they were in, assuming it was an infirmary and realizing there was only one bed-  
  
Oh God.  
  
This was John’s room.  
  
This was John’s _bed._  
  
It was surprisingly underwhelming for a man so ostentatious: It couldn’t be more than twenty square feet, and it appeared to be reasonably Spartan. Apart from the bed there was a desk, a table, a couple of boxes and trunks, and a doorway that could have been a closet- or perhaps a bathroom. There were assorted smaller items here and there, but no flash or fancy décor that echoed his ranch. But then, living in a bunker with all the other Peggies probably required that he not shove his hypocrisy in their faces.  
  
This was arguably much worse than being in her cell; at least the cell wasn’t so eerily quiet, so _private._ John could do anything to her in here and no one would hear her if she screamed.  
  
But then, even if someone _did_ hear her, they probably wouldn’t do anything about it.  
  
John was watching Hudson with a sort of… Interested expression. Like there was something about her that he found mildly fascinating. Hudson didn’t pretend to understand what it was that made that batshit brain of his tick, but she didn’t like the idea of being interesting to him. Interesting invited attention and she had had enough of his to last a goddamn lifetime.  
  
“So,” She muttered, nervously pushing her braid over her shoulder. “What happens now?”  
  
John took a deep breath. “Seven years,” he said (and Hudson now recalled what it was that had tipped her into unconsciousness before), “Is the time God has set down for the Father and the Project to stay in the bunkers. We’ll be protected from the perils of the Collapse down here until it’s safe to emerge.”  
  
Was that even right? Was seven years what it took for radiation- or the other effects of a nuclear apocalypse- to die down? Fuck if Hudson knew. From her basic grade-school U.S. History education about World War II and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even if they waited down here fifty years the ground would still be dangerous to live on. Irradiated soil and a depleted animal population meant that food would be hard to come by, and the water- who knew how long it would take for it to be safe to drink again?  
  
“…And in the meantime, what are we going to do down here?”  
  
“Learn and maintain the necessary skills to create a new world from the Collapsed one,” John said promptly, like he was doing another commercial. “As well as continuing to purify ourselves before God so that we are worthy to pass through Eden’s Gate.”  
  
Dread settled hard in Hudson’s gut.  
  
Seven years trapped in a bunker with a bunch of Peggies.  
  
Seven years having to play at worshiping God and Joseph Seed to avoid another torture session.  
  
_I’m gonna fucking **die.**_  
  
“Speaking of which- take your shirt off, please.”  
  
Hudson recoiled, a shudder running through her. “What?”  
  
John made a face. “I definitely could have worded that better: I need you to take your shirt off so I can tattoo you.” He picked up the tattoo gun from the table beside the bed and wiggled it in the air indicatively. “You need to be labeled with your sin as part of your atonement.”  
  
Hudson swallowed. “Then you’re going to cut it off, right?”  
  
John cocked his head at her, expression unreadable, and Hudson could feel the panic building in her chest. Could she run? Of course she could, but it wouldn’t matter because there was nowhere to go. Even if she could get back to the door, all that waited outside was a smoldering nuclear wasteland. If John wanted to tattoo a sin on her chest and then cut the skin away with a knife, he could and would do it no matter how hard she fought him.  
  
But he said, “No, Deputy Hudson, I won’t cut it off.” He stepped forward, reached out and gently brushed his fingers against her cheek, ignoring her when she flinched reflexively. “The Collapse has come, just as my brother predicted, and now…” John trailed off, expression still damnably indecipherable. “…Now is a time for mercy. The Father has asked that I restrain myself, and so I will.”  
  
It was the best answer she could have hoped for.  
  
So Hudson took a deep breath and started unbuttoning her shirt.  
  
She did it with her back to him, folding her uniform shirt and black t-shirt on the bed carefully, slowly to delay the inevitable. Without them she was down to the black-and-white lace bra that she’d been grumbling about the morning of the botched arrest attempt, because some of the lace had snagged and torn near the straps. Hudson remembered standing in her bedroom, in her house, with such a terrible clarity that it shook her, threatened to unmoor her completely where she was already at risk of drifting away.  
  
Too much was happening too fast, and she just couldn’t process-  
  
Behind her, John whistled.  
  
It was distinctively a wolf-whistle, and Hudson stiffened at the implications that came with it. For the first time since he’d brought her here, for the first time since she’d told him to go fuck himself in that first confession, Hudson felt a surge of fire in her chest; a boiling rage that this _cocksucker_ would actually have the gall to fucking _whistle_ at the sight of her in her bra and she really thought she might turn around and fucking punch the smirk off his-  
  
“ _Wow._ That is an _awesome_ tattoo.”  
  
“What?”  
  
Hudson looked over her shoulder, saw John’s gaze running up and down her back with interest and appreciation. “Where’d you get it?” He asked.  
  
Oh. _Oh._  
  
He wasn’t whistling at her bra- he was looking at the tattoo on her back. It was a large phoenix made of red, blue, green, orange and black whose head rested on her right shoulder-blade, while the tail hung down to her mid-back. The shading was excellent and the colors blended so seamlessly that her only regret was not getting it on her stomach or chest so she could see it better.  
  
“A… A college keg party,” Hudson said softly, the fire in her dissipating as quickly as it had risen. The normalcy, the reasonable nature of the question had taken her off-guard. John had, in the span of seconds, gone from ordering her to strip down so he could forcibly tattoo her with her perceived sin to complimenting her tattoo like a normal person. “Got lucky and got drunk-tattooed by the one guy who actually knew what he was doing.”  
  
“I can tell,” John said, reaching out and lightly brushing his fingers across her spine. Hudson shivered violently, wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s beautiful.” The touch lingered for a moment, and then disappeared. “Alright, down to business.”

 **PRIDE** was tattooed across Hudson’s chest over the course of ten minutes. John had given her the option of lying down or sitting up during it, and Hudson had chosen to sit. She’d known John would likely be straddling her for the procedure and the thought of him pinning her to a bed, looming over her with the tattoo-gun made her heart race almost painfully with dread. It stung, certainly, but she’d been through worse in recent days.  
  
John, to his credit, went about his business in a perfunctory, professional manner and did not sneak looks at Hudson’s cleavage, nor did he “accidentally” cop any subtle feels as he worked, seated on Hudson's lap with less than a few inches of space between them. “Why my chest?” She asked quietly, careful not to move too much as she spoke. “Why not my stomach or back?”  
  
“Well, first of all, you already have a tattoo on your back,” John remarked without looking up. “And I don't like covering tattoos with other tattoos. Second, Joseph prefers that the marks be reasonably visible to their owner, and the only other place I could tattoo you where it would be regularly visible would be your forehead.” He chuckled lightly. “And that would be a little _too_ visible.”  
  
_Harder to cut off, too,_ Hudson wagered.  
  
“Alright… Nearly done,” John muttered finally, putting the last few touches on the **E** before pulling back and eyeing his work critically. “Yes… Yes, that will do.”  
  
Hudson looked down. It wasn’t an aesthetically pleasing tattoo- wasn’t supposed to be, she figured- but John had at least done his best to make it even and neat. The skin stung terribly, and it hurt when she straightened up again and the skin stretched. “It looks… Nice.”  
  
John snorted. “I appreciate your attempt to soothe my ego, but it’s shit. Joseph doesn’t want them looking too nice, they need to ‘reflect the nature of their purpose’-” He cut himself off, apparently realizing that he’d been verging too close to criticizing Joseph. “…Anyway. It isn’t supposed to be excellent quality.”  
  
Hudson nodded mildly; theory confirmed. She grabbed her shirts and bunched the fabric in her hands. She was eager to not be topless in front of John Seed anymore, but the skin under her collarbone was aggravated enough that she knew putting the shirts on would be painful.  
  
“Well, Deputy Hudson,” John said, putting the tattoo gun on the desk and turning to smile at her. “Today is the beginning of a new age. I hope that you will embrace us as your family now, as we will embrace you.” Again, it came off more as a sales pitch rather than a heartfelt declaration of familial affection.  
  
“Of course,” Hudson said, unable to stop herself from sounding so _hollow_ as she said it.  
  
John turned back to her, a funny little smile on his face. “Do you know, Deputy Hudson, why I told you about my parents?” He asked, leaning back casually against the desk. “About how it was that they taught me the power of _yes?_ Do you know why I pour my shriveled little heart out to you and the other converts about how much _pain_ I had to suffer before I understood that all I needed to say was ‘yes’?”  
  
Hudson met his gaze without flinching, despite the bitter taste of dread clinging to the back of her throat. “You want me- You want _us_ \- to understand you better.” Was that what he wanted to hear? She sure as fuck hoped so.  
  
“I’d like you to.” John’s smile widened slightly. He pushed off the desk and paced leisurely over to Hudson, invading her space; it didn’t feel like he was trying to intimidate her, but it had the same effect anyway, especially since she still hadn't put her shirts on. “But I also want you to know that I understand _you._ I understand that you didn’t say ‘yes’ because you believe in Eden’s Gate, or in the Father, or even in God: You said yes to make the pain stop.”  
  
Hudson’s heart started pounding with alarm. “I… I-”  
  
“Shh, it’s alright,” John said, shaking his head and cupping her cheek with a hand. “It’s fine. Don’t lie. You don’t need to lie. I _understand_. First comes necessity, and then comes belief.” His thumb brushed across the skin below her eye, where bits of dark, tear-stained mascara were still clinging. “And now, by Joseph’s command, that time is over.” John said it casually enough, but Hudson detected a hint of a warning: _Joseph_ had commanded him to end his violent interrogations.  
  
And if anyone knew how to find a loophole in Joseph’s rules, it would John, the lawyer of the family.  
  
“You can go back to your cell now, Deputy,” John said smoothly. “Rest for today. Tomorrow, we set into the routine I plan to keep going for the next seven years.”  
  
“Can I-” The question had occurred to her spontaneously; but then it became caught in Hudson’s throat, fear choking her before she could finish.  
  
“Mm?”  
  
“I…” Hudson swallowed thickly, wrapping her arms around herself again. Asking John for anything felt dangerous- if she wasn’t risking overstepping some invisible Peggie boundary, she was risking putting herself into his debt.  
  
“Deputy,” John said, tone almost scolding as he realized where her hesitation was coming from, “We’re past all that now. You don’t need to be afraid of me.”  
  
_Bull-fucking-shit._  
  
Hudson sucked in a breath. “I just-” She shuddered, took another breath. “I just wanted to know if Whitehorse, Pratt, Rook and the Marshal were alright. If your siblings had them or if-” She choked again, this time with the fear of what would have happened if her coworkers hadn’t reached a bunker in time.  
  
John chuckled. “Is that all?” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling, blew out a breath. “Well, Pratt I’m pretty sure is alive, as is Burke. Both were with Jacob and Faith, and they survived; they were keeping them close by, so I assume they survived as well. Whitehorse and Rook…” He gave a little shrug. “I’m not completely sure. I’ll check in with Joseph and ask.”  
  
Hudson’s posture relaxed minutely. “Thanks. Uh- There was something else.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Is it alright if I go back to the door?”  
  
John hesitated, and Hudson sighed.  
  
“Where am I gonna go, John? Outside?”


	2. Chapter 2

Hudson spent a lot of time at the door.  
  
The guards were suspicious at first, but after a few weeks they came to regard her with a weary sort of familiarity. “Deputy,” Amos grunted as she walked up the steps.  
  
“Amos,” Hudson returned dully.  
  
Then she went to the window.  
  
The world had been coated in gray. Her vision was limited, but after a few weeks the smog from the bombs and the fires had cleared enough that she could see more of the forest beyond the bunker. The trees were black sticks jutting from the ground, eerie shadows of their former selves. If the smoke cleared more she’d be able to look down into the western half of Holland Valley, but for now it was just too thick.  
  
“How far away were the bombs that dropped?” Hudson had asked on one of her first sojourns to the door.  
  
Amos had hesitated before answering; maybe he suspected that she was formulating an escape. “Miles off,” He said finally. “I can’t know for sure, but I don’t believe any of the bombs fell in Hope County proper. At least, nothing within the bounds of the mountain range.”  
  
That was promising. Trying to survive on something that had taken a direct hit from a nuke would probably not be feasible.  
  
Hudson often spent an hour at the window before dragging herself away. Claustrophobia hovered at the edges of her mind like a caged lion, threatening to drag her in if she didn’t keep her distance. Coming to the window was how she staved it off; the reminder that there was still an outside that she could theoretically get to (even a destroyed, unspeakably dangerous one) did enough to stop her from crumbling into a quivering mess of panic.  
  
Eventually, though, Hudson always had to pull herself away and descend into the depths of the bunker again.  
  
As John had promised, a routine had settled in: Morning prayer, breakfast, work-time, recreation time, Bible/Joseph’s Word study time, Dinner, evening prayer, bed. Once a week, usually on Sunday, Joseph would come on over the radio from whatever bunker he'd holed up in and preach in that silvery voice of his. Any and all prayer time involved Hudson bowing her head and thinking of England; the Peggies were so eager to kiss Joseph’s ass during the religious study time that Hudson and any other unfortunate prisoners weren’t required to open their mouths. Work was more like school- those who were unfamiliar with certain tasks, such as sewing and gardening and hunting and building, were educated in such topics.  
  
“You’re better at this than I thought you’d be,” One Peggie named Maria remarked as Hudson almost flawlessly mended a shirt.  
  
“My mother taught me,” Hudson muttered, “But it’s been a while.”  
  
She fucking hated sewing, but she could do it decently enough. It was one of those things her mother had insisted on teaching Hudson when she was a child, and more often than not she’d been drunk for it. The sound of her mother slurring her words (some in English, some in the Kyrati dialect of Nepalese she’d been raised to speak) had been like nails on a chalkboard for Hudson as a girl and teenager, and that old irritability reared up every time she’d had to mend a tear in her jeans.  
  
Christ, but she’d take her mother’s drunken rambling over being trapped in a religious psycho’s bunker any day.  
  
After a time, John came back with the news: Pratt and Burke, as he’d theorized, were safe in Jacob and Faith’s bunkers. Deputy Rook was as well- she had ended up in a bunker with Joseph himself, and Hudson didn’t know whether to be alarmed or relieved by that. Rook was young, and not… _Naïve_ , but maybe not as savvy as she could have been. Hudson was worried that Joseph might worm his way into her head. Whitehorse, unfortunately, was the only one unaccounted for. Unless he’d found shelter with someone in a prepper bunker or some other decently fortified area, he was probably dead. The thought that he could be dead bothered her beyond words: Hudson had worked with Whitehorse for nearly five years, and he’d been a major source of support for her after Danny’s death.  
  
Hudson did her mourning at night, crying quietly into the thin pillow they’d given her. The door was left open now, because where the hell were any of the prisoners going to go, but it wasn’t as comforting as one might expect: John might be keeping his cool for now, but she didn’t trust the rest of the Peggies as far as she could throw them. She had a recurring fear, a scenario where she woke up with one of them pinning her to the mattress, hand over her mouth. They were capable of torture and murder, so Hudson couldn’t rule out that there were a few rapists in the bunch.  
  
Of course, maybe they wouldn’t have to resort to that when so many of them seemed to have willing partners. She knew this because the Peggies had some sort of weird lack of sensitivity to their surroundings when it came to sex; Hudson could hear some of them fucking openly in their hallway bunks with one another. Nobody yelled at them to stop, nobody made fun the next day or bitched about Lust (Hudson suspected that some of these couples were married)- it was simply ignored by everyone in the vicinity.  
  
Nightmares, on the other hand, gained much more attention.  
  
Hudson woke screaming some nights; she wasn’t the only one, not by a long-shot since the hallway she was in had prisoners housed in the other cells. Even a couple of Peggies screamed out in their sleep at night, though she suspected their nightmares were different from the prisoners that had been sealed in this underground hell against their wills. In the morning Hudson didn’t miss the raw, irritable expressions directed at her; nor did she miss the odd Peggie that bumped against her in ways that couldn’t be dismissed as accidental.  
  
On the whole, Hudson didn’t sleep much.  
  
Hence why John nearly gave her a heart-attack when he approached her at breakfast, where she’d nearly nodded off, head drooping closer and closer to the table. “Tired, Deputy?”  
  
Hudson jerked up, nearly flinging her fork over her shoulder. “ _Jesus_ -”  
  
“ _Shh_ ,” John hissed with a small, strained smile. “Blasphemy, Deputy.”  
  
Hudson shivered. One of the few lines she came dangerously close to crossing on a regular basis was blasphemy- she’d been doing her best to hold back any impulsive cries of ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘Goddamn it’, but it was a habit she was having trouble breaking. “Sorry.”  
  
“It’s fine, Deputy,” John remarked airily, “We all have our slip-ups. Come with me, I want to talk.”  
  
Hudson hesitated, but then slowly rose from her seat, taking her plate and utensils with her.  
  
“I wanted to discuss your role here,” John began leisurely as they made their way into the kitchen.  
  
Hudson found a tray of dirty dishes and put hers away, taking the opportunity to put a touch more distance between herself and John. “What about it?” She asked warily.  
  
“Well…” John looked at her with those deep blue eyes, and Hudson strongly suspected that this was the face he wore, the tone he used when he was trying to convince someone to sign their farm over to him. Her guard went up. “You were a Sheriff’s Deputy.”  
  
“Am.” Hudson’s insides tightened at the thought of doing anything to test John’s temper, but he’d rendered her very nearly powerless, not _spine_ less. “I _am_ a Sheriff’s Deputy.”  
  
John shrugged. “If you insist.” Clever boy: He’d kept any hint of condescension out of his tone as he said it. He could have smirked and said ‘sure, sweetheart, you’re _totally_ still a cop’; but then Hudson would have reacted badly.  
  
That meant that John wanted something from her, and that couldn’t be good.  
  
They continued through the kitchen. Hudson’s claustrophobic tendencies were being unpleasantly tickled by the amount of people in it, people she had to dodge and squeeze around. “Being a Deputy- especially as long as you were- as you _have been_ \- I imagine you’re adept at keeping things reasonably organized.”  
  
True: Anyone looking for proof could look at Hudson’s desk side-by-side with Pratt’s. There were probably things still surviving in that mess even in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse. “I am.”  
  
“And you are good under pressure.”  
  
True… Enough. Hudson had been better under pressure before Danny’s death. Now, now it was easier for her blood to get up on the job, especially when something went down and she couldn’t immediately account for her coworkers’ safety. That’s why one of her first questions after the “Collapse” had been to ask John who had made it.  
  
Aside from all of that, there was a certain irony to being asked this question by a man who’d effectively tortured her into a false confession not too long ago.  
  
Hudson crossed her arms uncomfortably as she slid past one of the kitchen workers. “More than the average bear, I suppose.”  
  
“Hm. Well, Deputy, I was thinking that perhaps we could put those skills to use.”  
  
_Oh no._  
  
“And what did you have…” Hudson trailed off, wrinkling her nose at a tray of meat on a table. It took her a moment to realize what it was that was disgusting her: There was raw meat slapped onto the tray right next to (what appeared to be) cooked meat. No barriers, no containers keeping them from touching one another. Hudson was a hunter: She had experience handling meat safely, and one of those safety rules was 'raw meat does not touch cooked meat'. She considered for a moment that the meat was expired, was going bad and about to be tossed… But then one of the cooks took a slab of the cooked meat from the tray and slapped it onto a plate.  
  
_So **that’s** how I’m gonna die: Idiots mishandling food._  
  
“Something wrong?” John was looking at her, one eyebrow raised.  
  
Hudson debated saying anything- sticking to the predictable script was safest with John, and bringing this up would be going off the beaten path- but considering that this was food that she and everyone else in the bunker was eating, it felt pertinent to ask. “Uh… Should- Should they be storing the meat like that?”  
  
John drew back, momentarily confused. But then he saw what she was looking at and took a closer look. After a moment or two, he raised his head and snapped, “Manager!”  
  
The kitchen seemed to come to a screeching halt all at once.  
  
From the workers stepped a particular Peggie who, despite his confident posture, looked the way most people had when Hudson had shown up at their houses unannounced in full uniform. “Yes sir, John, what do you need?”  
  
John pointed to the meat. “What is this?”  
  
The manager looked to the meat, then to John, then back to the meat. “Uh- That’s pork, sir.”  
  
“And what’s wrong with it?”  
  
The guy paled slightly  
  
_Shit. I hope I didn’t just kill this guy,_ Hudson thought.  
  
Anger flashed across John’s face. “You can’t,” he growled, “Keep raw meat in the same container as cooked meat. That causes cross-contamination, and cross-contamination causes _food poisoning_.” He drew in a long, slow, deep breath that sounded like a goddamn dragon getting ready to breathe fire. “How much of the meat have you stored this way?”  
  
The manager swallowed, and boy, so _this_ was what it was like watching John go off on someone else. Hudson was surprised to find herself empathizing with a Peggie, but hey, it was probably going to happen at some point during the seven years they were destined to spend in the bunker. _Unless we all die of food poisoning first._ “Uh… A-All of it, John. All of the cooked meat we have right now has been stored with the raw.”  
  
There was a vein pulsing in John’s forehead.  
  
_Shit. I might have just killed this guy._  
  
“So that would mean that almost a week’s worth of food has been wasted, and now needs to be thrown out.”  
  
The manager nodded, probably too scared to talk.  
  
John let out a low, slow growl. “Throw it out. All of it.” Then he turned and stormed out of the kitchen.  
  
Hudson stared for a moment, and then hurried after him into the hallway.  
  
She nearly bumped right into him, because John had only gone a few feet from the doorway instead of hurtling back towards his room. He was pacing back and forth, not especially cognizant of Hudson’s presence. She considered saying something, but this was enough of a red flag to keep her at a distance. Hudson had figured John for an angry person for obvious reasons, but blowing his stack over a week’s worth of damaged meat? It was bad, sure, but a week was fairly minor in the scheme of seven years. Losing his shit over something like this suggested that John was even more Type-A than she’d pegged him for.  
  
“ _Fuck!_ ”  
  
John turned and, in quick succession, punched the wall about nine times.  
  
Hudson stayed utterly still- _don’t move, and maybe he’ll forget you’re here_. She couldn’t help but notice that the hallway seemed to be curiously empty now, like any Peggies in the vicinity had scattered to the four winds upon noticing that John was in a mood.  
  
She couldn’t blame them in the slightest.  
  
Hudson waited a few minutes, just until John’s breathing became a little less intense before reluctantly stepping forward. “Here,” She said, “Let me see.”  
  
John didn’t acknowledge her for a moment, still staring off into the wall and breathing slowly. Finally, he held out his hand for Hudson’s inspection, and she had to will hers to stop shaking before taking it.  
  
The skin had split on the index and middle knuckles; all of the knuckles were inflamed, as were the segments of his fingers closest to his hand. At least he hadn’t made the mistake of tucking his thumb into his fist when he’d punched: It seemed like the only finger that wasn’t damaged. “You might have broken your knuckles,” Hudson said quietly.  
  
John grunted.  
  
“You’re going to have to have a doctor look at them.”  
  
Another grunt.  
  
“Do you do this a lot?”  
  
“Only when idiots do stupid things, like wasting food when we’re going to be in a fucking bunker for the next seven years,” John spat viciously. He let out a low growl and combed his good hand through his hair, knocking his sunglasses askew. “Joseph won’t be pleased.”  
  
“It’s not your fault.”  
  
“He may not see it that way.”  
  
“Then don’t-” Hudson cut off before she could finish, catching herself before she could make a mistake. She’d meant to say ‘then just don’t tell him’, but John would clearly not be pleased with that answer. If he was unwilling even to lightly mock his brother’s aesthetic preferences for the sin tattoos, he would be unwilling to lie to him too, and he would probably resent Hudson for even suggesting it. “…Then don’t, don’t spin it as a stupid mistake,” Hudson corrected. “Spin it as… Helping your people here learn better ways of operating, or something. You said Joseph wanted you to be merciful, so… So this is an opportunity to show him that you’re being merciful and educating them about their mistake rather than punishing them for it.”  
  
John stared at her silently for a long moment. “That is…” He began softly, “…A good idea.”  
  
Hudson crossed her arms tightly across her chest, trying not to make it obvious how relieved she was. “I’ve been known to have those on occasion.” She hesitated, wondering if she should push it any further. “You should maybe just… Take a breath and calm down next time. It’s not worth breaking your hand over some lost meat.”  
  
The adrenaline must have been wearing off, because John was holding his hand a lot more carefully now. “I don’t like stupid mistakes, Deputy,” He remarked smoothly. “I don’t like the people under my command acting like idiots. It reflects poorly upon my leadership skills.” The cool demeanor cracked when John lifted his hand and grimaced at the pain. “ _Hence_ ,” He continued, through clenched teeth, “Why I would like you to consider working with me.”  
  
Hudson stiffened. “With you?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Doing what?”  
  
John shrugged (prompting another cringe). “Oh, basic management duties, helping me hammer out schedules, the finer details of managing a place like this.” He frowned. “It helps that you seem to have an eye for noticing things that are out of place.”  
  
Hudson was overtaken with a horrible desire to burst out laughing.  
  
_You want me to point out things that are out of place? Christ, where would you like me to start? The torture-chamber where you made me confess my ‘sins’? The people you **forced** into this bunker also being **forced** to listen to your brother’s ramblings every goddamn week? Want me to keep going, John?_  
  
But Hudson bit her tongue.  
  
That was the response of a person that could afford to piss John off; someone who could afford to run away and hide where he couldn’t find them later.  
  
Hudson didn’t have that luxury.  
  
It was in her best interest to cooperate with John. She didn’t need to kiss his ass- nor did she intend to- but the better a relationship they had, the less likely he’d be to bring Hudson back to that room and making her confess more sins.  
  
“Alright,” Hudson said. “I’ll do it.”  
  
John’s smile had a hint of triumph in it, and she wanted to punch him for it.  
  
“I was hoping you’d say that, Deputy.”  
  
[---]  
  
Months passed.  
  
Hudson regularly assisted John in his management of the Bunker now. Mostly that involved accompanying him on his daily routine and taking notes, as well as keeping everything straight and organized. Generally, a portion of the day was spent in John’s room going over the various logistics of running the bunker: Arranging schedules for work-shifts, preparing food, storing food, training exercises, all things geared to keeping them alive and sane.  
  
It was a curiously calming thing, being at work again. It provided a reasonable distraction from the tight quarters and the potentially hostile roommates, and made the days pass faster. Hudson found this was true of many of the other prisoners as well: A few were still persistently miserable, but some had calmed down and found themselves coping better than they had before with life in the bunker. Even Frank, the Vietnam Vet that John had burned for refusing to confess, was rolling with it.  
  
“It doesn’t bother you?” Hudson asked quietly as John spoke with one of the engineers about a machine that had been acting funny. Along with tattoo artistry, it seemed John had a talent for mechanics as well and could discuss this sort of thing at length without issue. “It doesn’t bother you that I’m helping him, after what he did?”  
  
“Why would it?”  
  
“You did call him a ‘Millennial cultist fuck-for-brains’. And he did burn your face with a heated poker.”  
  
“Pfft,” Frank snorted, waved a hand. “I’m old, kid. I’ve had a long life. They can do whatever they want with me. You, on the other hand- you’re young. You’ve got a long life ahead of you.” He paused. “I’m just saying, you should do what you’ve got to do to stay alive, yeah? You can either play ball down here or take a stroll through the nuclear winter up above, so you may as well stay down here and play ball. These freaks are insane, but at least they ain’t beating us anymore.”  
  
It was true. John had stood by his word when he’d said he was going to honor Joseph’s request for mercy; he occasionally punched or kicked things when he was angry, but he didn’t attack people and he didn’t punish them the way he would have before. Progressively, Hudson found herself less intimidated by John, less wary that he might attack her unprovoked or unleash his temper on her when the urge took him. She began to pin down what it was that triggered things like wall-punching, and a sense of predictability did wonders for her nerves.  
  
If John’s temper had predictable triggers, then it was just a matter of knowing where the wires were and not tripping them.  
  
In spite of her mental state growing better, Hudson still found herself with nightmares that made her wake up screaming; and it was twice now, thankfully in moments when she’d been able to seclude herself, that she’d had panic attacks after feeling as though the air was too hot, too tight, and there was no way to open a window or go outside. The first time she’d simply had to wait it out, but the second time Hudson had been close enough to one of the storage freezers that she’d been able to throw herself in and take a few minutes to calm down.  
  
(It took an additional two minutes to realize that the freezer did not open from the inside, and another fifteen before a very confused Peggie came along and let her out.)  
  
As it was, there was nothing she could do about it. The only cure for this kind of anxiety, in her mind, would be leaving the bunker for good. But that wasn’t going to be an option for another six years and five months (but who was counting?) unless she wanted to die of radiation poisoning. So Hudson endured, and did her best to mitigate the effects of the bunker when she could.  
  
As time went on, Hudson found that even though she was no longer compelled to tell John the truth, she actually found herself telling him more than she had during the interrogations. He would ask her, casually, about how during one such interrogation she had mentioned (confessed to) disrespecting her mother often as a teenager; and Hudson, who could have simply given him the bare bones of it, told him the unedited story of how her mother had been a half-Kyrati woman born to a native Kyrati woman and an American missionary. Pagan Min’s hostile takeover had left them dead, and Hudson’s mother had come as a teenager to America, married and had a child and coped with the bloody memories with alcohol and religion and domineering behavior towards her husband and daughter.  
  
“I got mad that she drank so much,” Hudson muttered, talking but not looking at John as she mended one of her sweaters and remembered her mother snapping at her about her stitching. “I yelled at her sometimes. She loved telling me that if I’d been born and raised in Kyrat I wouldn’t be so disrespectful, because women didn’t raise their voices to their parents or their men. She drove me fucking crazy, and my dad drove me crazy because he just… Didn’t do anything about it.”  
  
It felt surreal to be having this conversation when they were both dead.  
  
Gone, like the rest of the world.  
  
John gave a soft hum. “Sans the alcoholism, my parents were quite fond of using the ‘in my day, children had respect’ bit whenever I misbehaved.” A beat. “Of course, they usually followed it up by demonstrating the sorts of punishments they received as children on me. And then some.”  
  
Hudson had already been briefed on John’s childhood- for something so traumatic he didn’t seem too troubled about discussing it openly, it was a regular talking-point for him- and was grateful that whatever faults her mother had she’d only ever slapped Hudson a few times, never burned her or beat her so bad that she’d…  
  
…Well, that she’d become one of the John Seeds of the world.  
  
A spontaneous question popped to Hudson’s mind, and it seemed a reasonable one- but she wasn’t sure how John would react to it. “Can I ask you a stupid question?”  
  
“Mm?” John hummed.  
  
Hudson hesitated, but then set down the clothes and looked him in the eye. “Do you ever miss your parents? Even after what they did to you? Or do you just hate them completely?”  
  
John’s eyes widened slightly, but otherwise he didn’t visibly react. He drummed the fingers of one hand on his thigh for a long moment, thinking. “The Father asks us to let go of hatred,” He said, with less of the usual polish he had whenever he was saying something he was _supposed_ to be saying. “So I do not hate my parents.” Pause. “But…” A flash of discomfort crossed his face. “…Yes. Sometimes I do… Miss them. They had redeemable moments, as we all do.” He stiffened a little. “ _Never_ repeat what I’ve just said to my siblings.”  
  
Hudson snorted. “I’ll be sure to keep it out of my secret weekly gossip sessions with Jacob over the radio.”  
  
John blinked- and then burst out laughing. Hudson laughed too after a moment, John’s rare, sincere amusement contagious. “I’m sorry,” He giggled, “But the thought of Jacob, of all people, gossiping like a little girl-” John slapped his thigh a few times with a hand and laughed harder; Hudson did too, bending over and clutching her stomach at the idea of big, bad Jacob acting like some middle-school girl whining about the bitches in the locker-room.  
  
Damn. It felt nice to laugh again.  
  
After the laughter had died down, Hudson felt safe enough to ask. “Are you afraid they’d be upset?” She asked. “Your brothers?”  
  
“Oh, they would be,” John responded, maybe more relaxed now than Hudson had ever seen him. “Jacob especially. He spent his time protecting Joseph and I from our biological parents as a teenager. He wouldn’t be too happy to hear that I had any love for the people who abused me. Any of them.” The relaxation faded into something more like resignation. “They’re dead, you know.”  
  
“Your biological parents?”  
  
John paused. “Our father, definitely: He died in prison. Our mother, I have no idea. But I was referring to the Duncans.”  
  
Hudson was unsettled by how certain John sounded about his adopted parents’ demise; far too certain for them to have died in the Collapse. She asked, “What happened to them?”  
  
(Hudson was already pretty sure she knew the answer.)  
  
John didn’t look at her. “Are you sure you want to know?”  
  
“Did you… Kill them?”  
  
John let out a low, slow breath. “I was a sophomore in college,” He started. “I came home for Spring Break. My parents were wealthy, and some of their friends’ children went to the same school as me. Evidently, _someone_ told them about some of the things I was getting up to at college.”  
  
“Like?” Hudson asked weakly.  
  
John waved a hand. “Sinful things, of course, but the usual you would expect of a college student away from home for the first time. Nothing that would shock you. But it infuriated my parents, and my father…” He paused. “Well, he brought out the cattle brand.”  
  
Hudson shivered. She couldn’t help but remember the burns on Frank’s face, and it just felt like they’d all been getting an object-lesson in why torturing children was a bad fucking idea: It produced adults like John. “Fuck.”  
  
John nodded mildly, expression distant. “Being away from home, being _free_ , I suppose it damaged my ability to tolerate the abuse on a mental level. So that night I took a page out of Jacob’s book and just… Set the house on fire.”  
  
_Oh Jesus Christ._ “Out of Jacob’s book?”  
  
“He set our foster parents’ barn on fire when we were young. They were using us as unpaid labor and were entirely unpleasant to us.” His smile was bleak. “He had a worse temper back then than I do now, if you can believe it.”  
  
“Not the biggest mental leap I’ve ever made.”  
  
“I suppose not.” John’s expression was… The distant detachment had receded somewhat, and now there was a curious sort of emotion that Hudson hadn’t seen on him yet and couldn’t quite identify. “Do you think that makes me a monster, Deputy?”  
  
Hudson swallowed, and considered her answer carefully.  
  
On one hand, setting a house on fire to kill someone was a shockingly callous crime. It was a slow death either by suffocation or burning (usually the former, occasionally the latter). And it wasn’t as though this sort of behavior was unusual for John: She and most everyone in the bunker seemed to have had at least one object-lesson in how rotten his temper could be, what sort of violence he would sink to if he was angry enough. Altogether Hudson would not be incorrect in describing John as a monster.  
  
But that wasn’t his question: He’d asked whether Hudson thought he was a monster for killing his parents.  
  
From every casual detail John had dropped about the horrendous things his parents had done to him- from the cattle brand to the beatings to the hours on his knees having to confess his sins- Hudson could not, as a human being, look at this _specific_ instance and say that John was a monster for what he’d done. In fact, it might have been the only instance where his violence had actually been taken out on someone who actually fucking _deserved_ it.  
  
Maybe that was wrong for a cop to say, but it was what she felt.  
  
“No,” Hudson said finally, quietly. “I don’t.”  
  
The corner of John’s lip quirked up. “You’re telling the truth,” He said, sounding a little surprised.  
  
Hudson shrugged uncomfortably. “I mean… You can’t do that sort of thing to someone for years and expect it to end well for you.”  
  
The little smile faded. “No… I suppose you can’t.” John paused. “Not a very law-enforcement oriented opinion, Deputy Hudson.”  
  
“I can empathize with someone’s motives while still enforcing the law.” She had a sudden epiphany and added, without thinking, “Just as I’m sure you can empathize with a sinner while still punishing them for it.”  
  
John’s eyes widen. “It’s not about punishment. It’s about atonement, and…” He trailed off, expression contemplative- even a little uncertain. He recovered quickly, shaking his head. “I see your point.”  
  
Hudson was floored: Had she just shaken John a little bit? Made him question himself, maybe even what he was doing on Joseph’s behalf?  
  
Christ.  
  
Wouldn’t that be something?  
  
[---]  
  
Life went on.  
  
When multiple people were expected to live in a bunker for years at a time, it became imperative that a routine be established and stuck to. This was how panic and chaos and intolerable boredom were avoided. Hudson understood the system well enough: Constant distraction did wonders for staving off the panic attacks that threatened her when she was at rest. She played her role well, and eventually it became obvious to everyone in the bunker that Hudson occupied a relative position of power at John’s side. Some Peggies seemed to be visibly relieved when it was her that came to talk to them rather than John; they knew they had nothing to fear from her.  
  
Others were not so pleased.  
  
On a particular day, Hudson was down in the infirmary speaking with a few of the midwives about the supplies they needed to requisition. This particular duty was one that John had all but thrown at her; and judging how blunt Judith was being about the reason for needing these items (“Last week poor Maria tore from her V to her A during her delivery and thank the Father we had just enough to patch her up after the fact”) Hudson was starting to understand why.  
  
“I’ll make sure you get a proper refills for your supplies,” She assured Judith, trying hard not to cringe even as the graphic description had her feeling some very nasty phantom pains.  
  
On her way out, she’d bumped into one of the infirmary staff, Lucinda, on accident. “Sorry,” Hudson muttered as she passed by.  
  
“Watch it, Sinner.”  
  
Hudson came to a stop, turning with narrowed eyes to face the other woman. “Excuse me?”  
  
Lucinda looked at her with a bitter sort of malice, the kind Hudson had had directed at her when she’d first entered the bunker. “You think if you play John’s whore you’ll get to have it easy here,” Lucinda hissed. “Well, you’re wrong. You’re not the first idiot to spread your legs for him, and you won’t be the last.”  
  
It did not shock Hudson that there were Peggies that still hated her. She knew she undoubtedly annoyed some of them with the nightmares, the nights where she woke everyone in the hall with her screaming; and regardless of what John or Joseph himself said, Eden’s Gate was and always had been extremely wary of authority figures, and Hudson was a cop through and through. Even John’s torture sessions hadn’t broken that from her. And while she was still generally pretty wary around him- old fears died hard- she was, perhaps, less inclined to take abuse from the other Peggies.  
  
So if Lucinda wanted to scrap with her, Hudson would lay her ass out and make her apologies later.  
  
Hudson calmly reached up, took Lucinda’s hand, and threw it from her arm. She put on the same face she’d once put on whenever she’d gotten a call to the Spread Eagle because some drunk behemoth was giving Mary May trouble and needed to be taken down a peg. “Do not,” Hudson said quietly, “ _Ever_ touch me again.”  
  
“You watch yourself, Sinner,” Lucinda spat as she walked out of the room. “You _watch_ yourself.”  
  
Hudson began the walk back to John’s room, clutching the notebook she used for her work tightly. She was not proud to admit that she was rattled: The routine of the bunker and the lack of violence she’d received from John and the other Peggies had done wonders for allowing her to keep her cool. But being confronted with the fact that there were people in this bunker still actively hostile towards her, despite her close work with John, had set off a spurt of anxiety through her.  
  
There were so many opportunities for her to be cornered down here, so many ways she could be beaten or killed and have it be passed off as an accident; Hudson would die the way she’d feared to before, in a steel coffin miles below the sky and fresh air.  
  
Hudson was finding it harder to breathe.  
  
Shit, shit, shit, a panic attack was coming on and she was in the middle of the hallway. She quickened her pace; she wasn’t far from John’s room now, and once she was there she could shut herself inside and ride the worst of it out there. Hudson managed to stave off the attack until she was at the staircase that led to John’s room- then, without witnesses, she half-collapsed on the stairs and curled in on herself, gasping for breath as she was overcome with panic.  
  
_I don’t want to die down here,_ Hudson thought desperately as she wheezed, _Oh God, I don’t want to die down here._  
  
The panic only lasted a few minutes this time, but it left Hudson a trembling, hypersensitive mess, one hand gripping the railing near her head to stop from tumbling down the steps. God, what she would not give to have been caught by a cult that believed in shit like tranquilizers.  
  
“Deputy?”  
  
Hudson jumped a mile, dropping her notebook. John was standing in the doorway of his room, eyebrow raised. “Don’t scare me like that!”  
  
John frowned. “Are you having another panic attack?”  
  
Hudson stared up at him, dumbfounded. “You- How do you-?”  
  
John rolled his eyes. “You aren’t the only one who reports to me, Deputy Hudson,” He responded with a sigh. “I have eyes and ears everywhere.” He motioned for her to follow him into his room; Hudson grabbed her notebook from the floor and stepped inside, and John shut the door behind her. “From what I’ve heard, Hudson, these attacks are really starting to become a problem for you. What is it, exactly, that brings them on?”  
  
What _exactly?_  
  
The fire surged up her throat, and in that impulsive moment, Hudson snapped.  
  
“What _exactly?_ ” Hudson croaked. “What _exactly_ , John? Seriously? Should I start with the fact that the entire fucking world’s been obliterated? Or maybe with the fact that almost everyone I know and love is dead? That I’m trapped in a fucking steel bunker that _you dragged me to_ against my _fucking_ will, so that you could torture me into confessing my sins? You think of all the places I want to live or die, that it’d be a fucking underground bunker with no sunlight that may as well be a coffin-”  
  
Oh, look at that, she couldn’t _breathe_ again.  
  
Of all the people Hudson would not want to have a panic attack in front of, John was definitely in the top five- just under his siblings, and right above a rabid grizzly bear that hadn’t eaten in a week. The absolute _last_ thing she needed was for John to know what could trigger her into a screaming panic at a moment’s notice; for all that she’d begun to relax around him, for all the limited ways she had learned to _trust_ him, Hudson still did not trust him enough with such a particularly dangerous secret.  
  
The panic attack went on for over five minutes, and tapered off far more slowly than usual. If Hudson had to guess, it was the proximity of the first attack and the anxiety of knowing that she’d just mouthed off to John in a borderline blasphemous way that had made this one last. She stayed on her knees, curled in on herself even once the attack had mostly subsided, afraid to look at John again. He was still standing there, not speaking or moving, just waiting for her to recover.  
  
“Is it over?” He asked dispassionately.  
  
Hudson nodded wordlessly, not meeting his gaze.  
  
“Can you walk?”  
  
Hudson swallowed thickly. Then, carefully, she rose to her feet, wrapping her arms around herself. Her legs were shaking, but she could walk; hell, she could run if she needed to, right back to her cell so she could hide under her blanket and never face John again.  
  
“Come with me.”  
  
Hudson shuddered, but did as instructed.  
  
She kept her head down, only lifting her eyes enough to keep track of John and where they were going. He didn’t say a word as they walked, and neither did she. Hudson was doing her damndest to stay nice and numb, not thinking to hard on where they were going or why; because the sheer number of possibilities- bad ones, mostly- could very realistically set her off again.  
  
When they reached the communications room, John stopped. “Wait here,” He said, pointing to a chair sitting against the wall.  
  
Hudson sat, and John went in.  
  
It had to have been thirty minutes or so before John called her in. Hudson kept her eyes shut the whole time, almost dozing in the chair once or twice. Two panic attacks in one day, within minutes of each other, were beyond draining, and disconnecting from everything was certainly easier than sitting there and contemplating what John had brought her here for.  
  
When she stepped into the room, John motioned to a chair in front of one of the radios. “Sit,” He said. “Have you used a radio like this before?”  
  
Hudson nodded.  
  
“Then you’ll know what to do.”  
  
John stepped away.  
  
Suddenly it hit her: Oh hell, he was putting her on with Joseph, wasn’t he? Was Hudson being treated to a lecture straight from the Father himself for flipping out and reminding John that she’d been kidnapped and forced into the bunker? Christ, what was she even going to say to Joseph? The last time she’d seen him was when she’d been having her shit kicked in by those Peggies during one of the group beatings, and Hudson wasn’t sure she’d be able to muster a polite word for a-  
  
“ _Hello?_ ”  
  
It took a moment for Hudson to recognize the voice; but when she did, tears pricked her eyes. “Staci?” She whimpered into the radio.  
  
“ _Wait,_ ” Came a male voice she recognized as Burke’s, “ _Are these the Deputies?_ ”  
  
“ _Marshal?_ _Is that you?_ ”  
  
Another voice came over the radio- female this time. “ _Hudson_ _? Pratt? Burke?_ ”  
  
Hudson clapped a hand over her mouth as the tears started to flow. Pratt, Rook, and Burke- all of them were on the line. “Sign off with ‘over’, guys,” She croaked into the radio. “Otherwise we’ll all talk over each other.”  
  
“ _It’s really good to hear from you all,_ ” Pratt said, sounding unspeakably relieved. “ _Uh, over._ ”  
  
“ _Faith mentioned you were all alive, but I didn’t figure I’d be hearing from you until the seven years were up. Over._ ” Was that relief Hudson heard in Burke’s voice?  
  
“ _I’m glad you’re all okay. Has anyone heard from Sheriff Whitehorse? Over._ ” Rook asked.  
  
Hudson sighed. “No. At least, nothing John’s told me. Over.”  
  
Silence.  
  
“ _He’s probably okay,_ ” Burke ventured. “ _Didn’t seem like a guy to go down easy, even with a nuclear apocalypse raining down on his head_.” A pause, while they waited for the ‘over’. “ _Are you_ **_all_** _with a different Seed? I’m with Faith, Hudson mentioned John- Pratt and Rook, what about you? Over._ ”  
  
“ _I’m with Jacob,_ ” Pratt confirmed. “ _In the Whitetails. I-_ ” Pratt was cut off- right before, Hudson thought she heard another voice in the background.  
  
“ _Pratt?_ ” Rook asked, nervously.  
  
“ _Sorry,_ ” Pratt said, “ _Nothing, it’s good. But yeah, I’m with Jacob. Over._ ” Hudson detected some irritation in his voice. Was someone in the room with him, listening in on his conversation? She glanced over her shoulder, but John wasn’t in the room. The Peggie who’d been stationed in the room was at his desk, flipping through his copy of Joseph’s Word and looking not even remotely concerned about Hudson’s conversation. He had to be paying attention- no other reason why he’d stay- but evidently didn’t object to anything Hudson had said so far.  
  
“ _I’m with Joseph. Over._ ” Something in Rook’s tone put Hudson on edge. The last time she’d seen Joseph Seed had been during that particularly brutal beating at the hands of his ever-devoted followers. Hudson remembered the utter lack of emotion on his face as she and the other prisoners had begged their attackers, begged _him_ to take mercy on them- and above all, she remembered how he’d walked away without a single word. She thought of shy little Rook, who’d eagerly assured Whitehorse that she could assist with arresting Joseph Seed because she wanted so badly to prove herself to her coworkers, only to get embroiled in this clusterfuck of a nightmare. Hudson clutched her fists tightly on her lap; if Joseph Seed had laid so much as a finger on Rook, the literal _first_ thing she would do upon leaving this bunker would be to hunt him down and choke him out with her bare hands. Same for Pratt and Jacob- she might need a crowbar, or perhaps a rocket-launcher to subdue the oldest Seed first, but she’d get there. Hell, she’d even go to bat for Burke at this point if he needed someone to. She couldn’t take for granted that the other Seeds had been as willing to at least _try_ to control their crazy as John had been.  
  
“And everyone’s… Alright?” Hudson asked carefully, and heard a small sound from behind her. Quickly, she added, “I mean, I assume some of you were outside when the Collapse happened. No radiation or… Anything else? Over.”  
  
There was a pause.  
  
“ _I’m fine,_ ” Burke said, sounding reasonably sincere; but then, Hudson didn’t know him well enough to know his tells. “ _I was in Faith’s bunker when this all went down. Never even saw the mushroom clouds. Honestly I was so doped-up on Bliss at the time I wasn’t even sure if it was real at first._ ” A beat. “ _Over._ ”  
  
“ _We were training when the bombs hit,_ ” Pratt offered. “ _Jacob ordered us all into trucks so we could get to the bunkers, but **fuck**. It was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever fuckin’ experienced, including that helicopter crash. Over._”  
  
“ _I was leaving- uh- a friend’s bunker when a patrol caught me,_ ” Rook said. Hudson frowned. She’d heard something in the background of Rook’s transmission: Something that sounded almost like an… Animal? Or maybe a baby? There must have been others in the room with her. Maybe she and Joseph hadn’t had time to get to a larger bunker and were crammed in with other Peggies. “ _They brought me straight to Joseph. We were together when the bombs hit, and he brought me to a bunker. Over._ ”  
  
Hudson was vaguely disappointed. She knew they were alive, but this didn’t answer the question of whether or not her friends were safe. Of course, in retrospect, it was foolish to expect any of them to confess to or imply that they were being mistreated- not when they had others in the room with them, and not when they still had a little over five years left in the bunkers. She could only hope that the Seeds were all under orders from Joseph to play nice.  
  
The four of them talked for the next twenty minutes, until Pratt said that his time was up. “ _I hope we can all talk again soon,_ ” He said, making Hudson choke up a little. “ _I miss you. Pratt out._ ”  
  
Rook soon followed. “ _I miss you all too,_ ” She said, a slight warble to her voice. “ _I can’t wait until we can see each other for real. Bye._ ”  
  
Burke went after that. “ _It’s… Nice to hear from you guys,_ ” He said, once he and Hudson were the only ones left. “ _Gotta figure everyone I knew in Missoula is…_ ” Pause. “… _Well. It’s nice to know I’ll be seeing some familiar faces once I’m out of here._ ”  
  
“Same here,” Hudson sighed. Burke had irritated her in that ways Feds always irritated small-town cops, coming down from on-high and issuing orders like he was top-dog. But fuck if Hudson couldn’t empathize: At least once they were out of these bunkers she’d know most of the non-Cultist members of Hope County who’d survived. Burke would be in a strange place with no one he knew. “Hope we talk again soon, Burke.”  
  
“ _Good night, Hudson._ ”  
  
Burke signed off, and Hudson leaned back in the chair, stretching out and rubbing her face.  
  
Shit. That had been intense. She hadn’t been expecting to talk to Pratt, Rook, Burke, or- well, anyone else she’d known from outside the cult for at least another five years. She Hudson felt a strange feeling of calm settle over her, something she had notably not been feeling earlier when-  
  
“Feel any better?”  
  
Hudson turned around.  
  
John was standing behind her, arms folded behind his back. He was clearly uncomfortable now, posture stiff, not quite meeting Hudson’s gaze. She suspected that John wasn’t in the habit of doing kind things with no ulterior motive- or at least, not without being commanded to by his brother.  
  
The full impact of this realization hit her then:  
  
John had done this for her.  
  
He had recognized that Hudson was in considerable emotional distress, and had remedied the situation by allowing her to contact her friends- which, depending on the schedules in the other bunkers, might not have been such an easy feat. It was more empathy than she honestly thought he was capable of, and it was bewildering.  
  
John had done this for _her_.  
  
Hudson stood up.  
  
And then, without thinking, she threw her arms around him.  
  
John stiffened even worse for a moment; but then, slowly, he began to relax. One arm came to wrap around Hudson’s back.  
  
“Thank you,” She whispered.  
  
There was a pause; then, John squeezed her gently.  
  
“It’s not a problem, Deputy.”  
  
[---]  
  
Closer and closer.  
  
Where once Hudson had flinched away from John’s touch, now she touched _him_ with a willingness that would have shocked (and disgusted) her old self.  
  
“Did you do these yourself?” She asked one day, fingers tracing over the tattoos on his arms.  
  
Hudson felt him shiver slightly. “Most of them,” He admitted with a little smile. She’d figured as much: They all had the same style to them, spiky black ink with no color. They were far better-looking than the sin tattoos, though; it seemed John could tattoo quite well when he wasn’t constrained by Joseph’s will.  
  
On the inner part of his right arm was a set of sharp lines, and it took a moment of turning her head a bit for Hudson to realize that it was the word **SLOTH** , but with a line drawn through it. The letters were warped, disjointed, like they’d been cut in half. “Was this before or after the one on your chest?” She asked.  
  
John went stiff, and his expression went completely blank. “Before,” He said, voice completely lacking in emotion.  
  
Hudson thought about asking why he’d done it twice. But she wasn’t stupid: Obviously something about this particular tattoo bothered him, and it wasn’t worth it to irritate him over it. She let it go and took his hand, instead examining the sins he’d tattooed onto his fingers, and eventually he relaxed again.  
  
As it was, it hadn’t occurred to Hudson until now that the attention John had been paying her was unusual. She’d heard plenty of rumors that the youngest Seed brother had been a wild child, that even under Joseph’s sway he’d been known to bring different women home with him. But there had never been talk of John having a steady girlfriend, or even _friends,_ period. That wasn’t too shocking, considering how insular the Seeds were (she doubted Jacob was drowning in friendship either- she’d heard the man had the personality of a rabid badger), but it was just now occurring to Hudson that she might be one of the few people John actually might have an actual emotional connection with outside of his siblings.  
  
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.  
  
But she sure knew how Lucinda did.  
  
“Why do you spend so much time in John’s room?” Lucinda spat one day in the cafeteria, pacing around Hudson like a caged cougar. “You say you’re not sleeping with him- then why the hell are you in his room so much?”  
  
Hudson turned and glared at Lucinda. “What the fuck are you?” She snapped. “His ex-girlfriend or something? I don’t owe you an explanation.”  
  
“The hell you don’t!”  
  
Hudson got up, intending to take her plate to the kitchen and leave. Instead, Lucinda blocked her path and looked at her with an expression of true loathing… And possibly some jealousy.  
  
Ah, so _that’s_ what it was.  
  
“Oh,” Hudson said with a small, tight smile. “I get it. Not an ex-girlfriend; he never even gave you a second glance, _that’s_ your problem.” She leaned in. “So I guess only _wanting_ to get fucked by John makes you holier than me. Got it.”  
  
Lucinda shoved her.  
  
“Sisters,” A Peggie named Marcus warned as Hudson’s hackles went up, “This is not how the Father-”  
  
“You should have been left to rot in the Collapse with that Sheriff of yours!”  
  
_The **FUCK** -_  
  
Hudson threw herself at Lucinda, tackling her to the ground.  
  
In retrospect, Hudson had definitely had an unfair advantage. She’d thrown down with men who had a hundred pounds and a lot of muscle on her and won; Lucinda was a pathetic opponent at best in comparison. But even then Hudson didn’t let up, because _fuck this bitch_ for making light of Whitehorse’s probable demise, _fuck_ her for thinking that she could say this sort of shit and that her devotion to ‘ _The Father_ ’ would save her from the fucking wrath that Hudson would bring down on her.  
  
The fight ended with Marcus and a man named Samson yanking her off Lucinda, all while she was still kicking and cursing and swearing that she _better_ keep her _God-_ damned mouth shut about Earl Whitehorse if she didn’t want to meet her fucking God any sooner than she needed to.  
  
Marcus all but dragged her to John’s room.  
  
Hudson was still vibrating with rage, and so she didn’t say anything when Marcus told John what had happened. To his credit, despite the fact that he sounded like a teacher dragging a student before the principal, he stayed neutral in his account; maybe because he didn’t approve of Lucinda’s behavior, or maybe because he noticed there was still steam coming out of Hudson’s ears and didn’t feel like getting what Lucinda had gotten by taking the wrong side.  
  
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention, brother,” John said smoothly, eyes flipping to Hudson with an unreadable expression. “I will handle this. Please tell Lucinda that she can expect a discussion with me later.”  
  
Marcus nodded. “Of course, John.”  
  
He left; and for a few minutes, John and Hudson stood in complete silence.  
  
“Anything to say, Deputy?”  
  
“If you’re going to ask me to apologize,” Hudson said coldly, “You can go fuck yourself. Put me back in the fucking _chair_ , make me confess more _sins_ , do whatever the fuck you want, John, but I’m not apologizing for putting that bitch in her-”  
  
John darted forward and kissed her.  
  
Hudson was stunned. For a moment she didn’t respond, taken by surprise and then uncertain as to what she should do. But after a moment, after she’d had a chance to collect herself, she returned the kiss with more interest than she ought to have. She gripped John by the front of his vest until she ran out of air.  
  
They parted, both heaving for breath.  
  
Hudson stared at John, brow furrowed. “That’s a fuckin’ weird reaction to finding out I beat up one of your disciples.”  
  
John gave a light shrug. “I’ve been aroused by stranger things.”  
  
Hudson laughed, because what the _fuck_ else was she supposed to do? “I believe it,” She said, hoarsely. “But why…?”  
  
“When I first brought you here,” John said, “I asked you to confess, and you told me to go fuck myself.” He leaned in and bumped his forehead against hers, their lips brushing. “I really like that.”  
  
Hudson felt a wave of something dark wash over her. “You didn’t seem to be so fond of it then.”  
  
John’s eyes snapped open, and for a moment Hudson would swear she saw… Remorse? Guilt? It wasn’t the defiant attitude of someone who stood by what they’d done, that was for sure. “That was then,” He said quietly. “This is now.”  
  
Hudson’s breathing grew ragged. “You want me to say Yes?”  
  
John nodded, pupils dilated. “Yeah.”  
  
Hudson froze for a moment, considering; and then she gave John a hard shove, pushing him onto his bed and climbing on top of him.  
  
“Fuck that,” Hudson hissed. “Today, you say yes to _me_.”  
  
John shuddered deeply. “Yes, yes, _fuck_ yes,” He groaned.  
  
So they fucked.  
  
Long and hard, for about an hour.  
  
They did a _lot_. The sort of things that Hudson would have been embarrassed to cop to if the world were still as it should have been; good as it felt at the time, her cheeks would heat up later to remember how frantically she’d begged John to fuck her when she’d been bent over the edge of his bed. Of course, she would have never copped to doing _anything_ sexual to John Seed if the world were still normal- it probably would have cost Hudson her badge.  
  
“We should stop now,” Hudson panted after John brought her off with his mouth, hands shaking as she disentangled them from his hair. “Fuck, we should stop now. I think I’m going to strain something if I come again.”  
  
“Yeah,” John responded, moving to lie beside her on the narrow bed (he obviously hadn’t been anticipating a bedmate when he’d gotten it). “I’m, uh, I’m running on fumes at this point.”  
  
“Same.”  
  
_I just had sex with John Seed,_ Hudson thought faintly, barely registering it when John put his arm around her and finagled the sheets out from beneath them and brought them up to cover them both. _I just had really **good** sex with John Seed. Fuck._  
  
That was going to be a hell of a thing to deal with once she was out of the bunker.  
  
Eventually Hudson slipped off into unconsciousness, her head on John’s shoulder and her hand resting on his chest, right below his **SLOTH** tattoo. And though she tended to sleep better when someone else was with her, it didn’t take long for Hudson’s brain to conjure up a bad dream.  
  
This particular nightmare was the worse of the bunch. It always started in her cell. Hudson would wake up and go to the door, look out into the hallway to find it empty and silent. And so she would walk, looking for someone, anyone, Peggie or prisoner. She would pass through doors and walk up and down staircases, calling out to anyone who might be listening; all Hudson received in response was deafening silence.  
  
The realization that she was alone in the bunker always sparked the fear.  
  
_I need to leave,_ Hudson would think as her pulse started to race. _I need to leave, I need to get out here right now._  
  
And so she tried.  
  
Hudson tried so hard, opening doors and rushing up staircases only to find that the hallways were endless, that she was confused, that things weren’t where they were supposed to be and that she couldn’t find a way out. The bunker could not be escaped no matter how fast she ran, and with no one else below with her the terror rose higher and higher.  
  
_I’m going to die down here,_ Hudson thought in a panic, _I’m going to die down here, I’m never going to get out, I’m never going to see daylight again, oh God I’m gonna die I’m gonna die I’m gonna **die-**_  
  
Hudson woke up with a hoarse cry, struggling as something pressed down on her, suffocating her. It took a moment or two before she remembered where she was, before she realized that it was only a dream and that she wasn’t actually being suffocated. John’s arms were wrapped around her, lips pressing drowsily against her cheek. “’S okay,” He mumbled, nuzzling against her and squeezing her against his chest. “’S alright. You’re alright.”  
  
Hudson panted, moving his arms away from her chest so she could breathe without feeling restricted. After a few minutes the panic dissipated, and Hudson was able to lean back against John and shut her eyes.  
  
Damn. She _hated_ that dream. Hudson hated it more than all the others.  
  
It was bad enough to be stuck underground, but it would be worse to alone.  
  
John pushed his head against hers sleepily. “Mm? You alright?” He murmured into her ear.  
  
Hudson hesitated, but then gently pulled John’s arm around her again, scooting closer to him and settling her head against his chest.  
  
It shouldn’t have felt as good as it did.


	3. Chapter 3

They’d been in the bunker for just over two years.  
  
John’s demeanor towards Hudson had changed subtly since their first time together. There was an intimacy to their interactions that hadn’t been there before- not a romantic intimacy, per se, but something that suggested a deeper connection than employer and employee, which was essentially what they’d had before.  
  
Friendly. God help her, but John was treating her like a _friend._  
  
And even more wild a realization: Hudson thought of him as a friend too.  
  
They’d spent a lot of time together. They’d worked together on so many things, had so many conversations- and the more they talked, the more Hudson’s suspicion that John was connecting with her in a way he didn’t with others grew stronger and stronger. Occasionally she got the impression, like when he admitted to sometimes missing his parents, that she was being told something that he hadn’t told anyone else. That he was _trusting_ her with something that he hadn’t trusted many people with.  
  
Furthermore, John hadn’t hurt her since before the Collapse. He had reined in his temper enough (admittedly at Joseph’s command rather than doing so of his own free will) that he was no longer a source of intimidation for her. It was pretty fucked up, because Hudson knew that in the world before the Collapse no amount of anger management could make up for literally torturing someone into submission, but… Fuck. If John were _still_ behaving that way, like some batshit tyrant that would ram a screwdriver through your leg if you so much as looked at him funny, it would be a lot easier to keep right on hating him; but as a somewhat calm, reasonable person, it was surprisingly easy to let the resentment go.  
  
Besides, what else could she do? Forcing herself to keep hating John would only drain her of mental and emotional energy that she just didn’t have. It was easier and healthier for Hudson to just say ‘as long as he behaves I’ll play nice with him’ and move on.  
  
It was simple.  
  
Hudson liked simple.  
  
And that was probably why the universe decided to throw something considerably more complicated into her path.  
  
It was Sunday, and Joseph’s sermon over the radio had just ended. Many Peggies listened as the sermon was piped throughout the bunker, but a chunk of them congregated in a room essentially set up as a church- John was always there, as well as a few of his lieutenants, and usually the prisoners that had survived the Collapse joined them in the room as well. Hudson usually sat beside John, enduring the sermon with a bland expression and trying to find ways to stop herself from falling asleep.  
  
Today was no different. Hudson would not remember the sermon later, or even what method she’d used to keep herself awake while Joseph droned on about the evils of the modern world. She wouldn’t remember exactly how long the sermon had been today- it varied from time to time- or how long it took for the other Peggies in the room to stand up and file out.  
  
What she _would_ remember was that she went to stand up-  
  
-and abruptly the world went dark, then light, then blurry.  
  
Hudson’s knee-jerk reaction was that there had been a power-surge, that the lights in the room were flashing; but then she came back to complete awareness to find John holding her by the waist, eyes wide. “Hudson? Hudson, are you alright?”  
  
Head spinning, Hudson slowly sat back down on the bench. “Uh…” She wasn’t incoherent, but the light-headedness she was experiencing left it difficult to concentrate on what she wanted to say. “Uh… I’m just…”  
  
John knelt down beside her, his hand warm on her knee. “Did you maybe stand up too quickly?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Hudson murmured. “Just give me a second.”  
  
The dizziness didn’t abate until John led her back to his room (she slept there more often than not now) and had her lie down for a while. When she woke it was gone, and Hudson assumed- hoped, really- that it was just a fluke, that a few years of living on bunker rations, or maybe living without sunlight for that same period of time, had maybe screwed with her body.  
  
Then the nausea started.  
  
It was nothing catastrophic: There was just a constant level of upset to her stomach that put her off of eating too much, that made her move a little slower and more carefully. Only once or twice did she hurry to the bathroom, stomach aggravated enough that she was afraid of puking. Occasionally, bouts of dizziness overtook her again, though they never caused her to faint.  
  
It took almost a month of this for Hudson to develop an inkling about what was wrong with her.  
  
It was not a _good_ inkling- in fact, it was a fucking terrifying one- but once it occurred to her she couldn’t just forget it and pretend it wasn’t a possibility. She lay awake at night beside John, heart thudding almost painfully from the fear of it.  
  
It took days to muster the courage to go down to the infirmary and ask Judith to check her out. That courage depleted as Judith performed the exam, and hit rock-bottom when the older woman finally said,  
  
“Seems you were right, Deputy! It looks like you’re expecting.”  
  
_Oh God, Oh God, Oh God…_  
  
No. No, this couldn’t be happening.  
  
Living with John Seed was doable.  
  
Having sex with him from time to time was doable.  
  
Having his _child_ was a level of- of _something_ that she just wasn’t prepared for.  
  
She should have been. What the fuck could she have expected? They’d been having unprotected sex for the last few months with no attention to when she was ovulating, and pulling out was not a reliable birth-control method.  
  
Strange as it sounded, being underground impacted one’s ability to instinctively measure the passage of time. Hudson had to rely on clocks and calendars, not the inherent ability to watch the sun rise and set and psychologically comprehend that two weeks’ worth of time had gone by. As such- especially as distracted as she was with her daily routine- it had been bizarrely easy to forget that she hadn’t gotten her period for almost three months. It had been easy to forget that despite everything else in her world changing, her body still had the parts and processes to make a baby.  
  
And it was starting to look like that was precisely what it had done.  
  
“Congratulations, Deputy,” The nurse, Alice, remarked with a thin, tight-lipped smile when Judith left to tend to another patient. Hudson detected judgment from her that she hadn’t gotten from Judith, and was confused until she remembered that this was Eden’s Gate: Sex outside of marriage was forbidden, and as Hudson had not been married in the bunker or been known to have a husband, it was obvious that this pregnancy was illegitimate.  
  
Before the bunker, Hudson would have just told her to fuck off.  
  
But two years in the bunker watching her every move and word had taught her the fine art of reflexive, passive-aggressive bitchery: “Oh, thank you Alice, I’m just so _happy,_ ” Hudson exclaimed with a bright, forced smile as she pulled her jeans back on. “I’m sure John will be too.”  
  
The color went out of Alice’s face.  
  
_Joey one, Bitch nil._  
  
That satisfaction lasted about the length of time it took her to get back to John’s room.  
  
Hudson spent a solid five minutes with her hand on the door-handle, through running different ways of breaking the news to him:  
  
There was the ever straight-forward _I’m pregnant._  
  
There was the more inventive _Hey, guess what, we can have rubberless sex for the next nine months without having to worry about getting pregnant. Why? Can’t get pregnant once you already are!_  
  
Of course, she could always keep it on lock until she was in labor. _Cool story, see that head sticking out of me? **You** helped make that!_  
  
Hudson leaned forward and slowly banged her head against the door a few times.  
  
“Was that you just now?” John was sitting behind his desk when she stepped inside. “It sounded like someone was knocking.”  
  
“Yeah,” Hudson muttered, “It was me.” She paced over to his bed and sat down, covering her eyes with her hands. She heard John rise from the desk and pace over to her.  
  
“Are you alright?”  
  
Hudson sighed. “Define ‘alright’.” She didn’t move her hands, didn’t look at him before continuing. “I went to the infirmary to get checked out.”  
  
Silence.  
  
“Are you pregnant?”  
  
Hudson’s hands dropped from her eyes, and her mouth fell open.  
  
Well, of all those scenarios she’d never pictured that he’d figure it out on his own.  
  
“Wow, you guessed that pretty fast.”  
  
John wobbled, reached out and stepped backwards to steady himself on the desk. “Are… Are you sure?”  
  
Hudson nodded, arms folded tightly across her chest. “Judith confirmed it. Plus I’ve missed three periods, and with all the dizziness and the nausea…” She shrugged. “I mean, It’s either pregnancy or I’ve spontaneously developed radiation poisoning.”  
  
John gave a wild laugh, slapping a hand to his forehead. “Gone on any long walks in the nuclear winter lately, Joey?”  
  
Hudson chuckled, nervousness and humor combining in a wild churn of emotion. “No, no, not lately.”  
  
John’s hand covered his eyes. “Fuuuuuuuuuck,” he moaned. “Fuck.” He put his hands down and looked at Hudson. “I’m not trying to freak you out,” John said quickly. “I’m not, like- _I’m_ freaking out, but not because I’m not happy, I just…” He shifted uncomfortably. “…This is gonna be a fuck of a conversation with Joseph.”  
  
“Fuuuuck,” Hudson echoed, and they both started laughing again, John collapsing beside her onto the bed and putting an arm around her.  
  
This was, arguably, the most _normal_ she’d ever seen John behave. If an outsider had seen John in this moment, with no context, he could have been mistaken for an entirely normal young man reacting nervously to the news that he would be a father. It was easy for Hudson to convince herself of that for a little while as they lay on the bed, John’s hand sliding up and down her back.  
  
“So,” He muttered. “Are you… Happy? Upset? I can’t read you right now.”  
  
Hudson thought about it. She wouldn’t say she was _happy_ , per se: The concept that she would be experiencing pregnancy and giving birth in an underground bunker with a cult that didn’t believe in things like epidurals did not inspire happiness in her; nor could she claim that, despite the calm between them now, that she was happy to be having the baby of a man who’d once tortured her.  
  
That being said… She wasn’t _un_ happy either.  
  
“I don’t know,” Hudson sighed. “Ask me again when I’ve had a chance to get used to the idea of being someone’s mom.”  
  
“Fair enough.”  
  
[---]  
  
The next few months passed way, _way_ too quickly.  
  
Hudson’s anxiety increased every time she noticed that her stomach had swelled to a slightly larger curve than before. At five months, it was nearly impossible to hide the fact that she was pregnant unless she was wearing an especially large sweater.  
  
John had evolved again, as he had when they’d started having sex: Now he treated Hudson more like a girlfriend than he did a friend (or friend with benefits, as it were) and- bless his heart- seemed to be taking on the attributes one would expect of a nervous father-to-be.  
  
“Careful,” John hissed, catching sight of her lifting a box onto a shelf in one of the storage areas. “I’ll get it.”  
  
Hudson rolled her eyes as he took the box out of her arms. “Jesu- _John_. I can lift a _box_ without the baby exploding. It’s barely ten pounds.”  
  
John frowned as he shoved the box onto the shelf. “The box, or the baby?”  
  
Hudson slapped a hand over her face. “Were you _never_ taught about basic human reproduction?”  
  
“I grew up in two religious households,” John grunted, obviously embarrassed at his ignorance. “Sex ed wasn’t really something I got a lot of as a child. What I got as an adult wasn’t exactly in-depth enough to include detailed charts about fetal development.”  
  
Hudson laughed helplessly, shaking her head. “I’m something like… Six months. It looks like a baby, and it’s probably…” She shrugged, trying to draw up on information she learned years ago when one of her cousins was pregnant. “…I don’t know, probably a couple pounds. I’m pretty sure it can hear us, maybe even recognize our voices? I’m not sure. It’ll probably start kicking soon too, so muscle and brain development’s probably pretty good.”  
  
“Huh.” John scrutinized her stomach for a moment, and then tentatively reached out to press his hand against it. After a moment he muttered, “You, uh… You let me know when you start feeling that.” He almost seemed embarrassed to be asking that of her.  
  
Hudson chuckled, patting his hand. “Will do.”  
  
What Hudson was feeling for John now was… Definitely affection. She couldn’t call it love, but it was definitely more than the tentative friendly-coworkers relationship they’d been rocking before she’d gotten pregnant.  
  
That being said, Hudson had some lingering nerves about this new, disturbingly permanent connection to him. She wanted to believe that John would be a good parent, that he wouldn’t lash out and hurt their child with that temper she still vividly remembered from her first weeks in the bunker. She wanted to believe that he could control his temper with said child the way he had with her and the others in the bunker for the past few years.  
  
But John had been commanded to show that restraint by Joseph. And everyone in the bunker had gone out of their way not to make him angry, fearful that his devotion to Joseph could only rein him in for so long. Hudson was confident that a baby would not have that same tact, and so she felt the lingering sort of dread that one felt when they saw a train speeding towards them on the tracks.  
  
But instead of just getting off the tracks, she was going to have to wait until the train was dangerously close until she could move.  
  
“Would you like to speak to Deputy Rook?” John asked her one day after they’d reached a decent stopping point in their work.  
  
Hudson perked up. She’d spoken to Rook, Pratt, and Burke only once since their initial contact, and wouldn’t mind at all getting to speak to Rook again. “Yeah,” She said, rising from her chair with a little difficulty (her stomach was just big enough now to start giving her trouble).  
  
Rook was already on the line when Hudson got to the communications room. “ _Hey Hudson,_ ” she greeted; her tone was friendly, but Hudson heard some strain in it. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but was there a reason John had arranged this call? Was something wrong with Rook?  
  
“Everything okay?” Hudson asked, squeezing the microphone apprehensively. “You sound a bit funny.”  
  
A long pause.  
  
Just as Hudson was gearing up to ask after Rook again, “ _Joseph said- well, John told him you were pregnant._ ”  
  
Hudson’s unease increased. Fear began to seep into her veins: Had Rook intuited that John was the father? Was she upset that Hudson was having a baby with one of the Seed brothers? “I am,” She admitted, free hand digging into her thigh. “I’m… About six months along.”  
  
There was a long silence after that.  
  
Hudson hadn’t experienced a huge amount of that emotional upheaval she always heard about during pregnancy, but now her eyes were burning and she was dangerously close to crying. She hadn’t been forced to confront it yet, but some day she was going to be coming face to face with some of the people the Seeds had fucked with and she knew she’d have to answer for why she’d found it acceptable to get too friendly with John. If Mary May was still alive she was probably never going to speak to Hudson again. But Rook too?  
  
Hudson pressed the button hesitantly. “Rook, say something.”  
  
A pause.  
  
Then-  
  
“ _I had a baby._ ”  
  
Rook blurted it out like she’d been holding it in.  
  
Hudson’s mouth dropped open. She hesitated, thumb hovering above the button before pressing it. “When, Rook?”  
  
“ _Almost a year ago._ ”  
  
“Jesus, Rook!” She didn’t give a shit if any Peggies were listening.  
  
“ _I know, I’m sorry, I just… I didn’t know how to tell you._ ”  
  
Hudson’s head dropped to the desk, doing the math faster and easier than any exercises she’d done in school: Almost a year ago meant that Rook’s baby had been born a little over a year after they’d all gone underground. And that meant- assuming the baby wasn’t severely premature- she had gotten pregnant within only a couple of months after the Collapse.  
  
And she could think of only one man who could have gotten close enough to Rook to get his dick in her.  
  
“Is the father who I think it is?” Hudson nearly whispered into the radio, even though it wouldn’t matter if anyone was listening in over the connection.  
  
There was a long, long pause, and they’d forgone the ‘Overs’ but Hudson knew Rook had heard her. Eventually, in a small voice, came the answer: “ _Probably. Is **your** baby’s father who **I** think it is?_”  
  
Hudson didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Probably,” She whimpered. A horrible thought occurred to her. “Was it consensual?”  
  
“ _Yes!_ ” Rook confirmed quickly. “ _I- yeah. We got…Carried away. Was… Yours?_ ”  
  
“Yeah,” Hudson said wearily. “Yeah, it was. Over.”  
  
Fuck. Fuck.  
  
She didn’t judge Rook, she really didn’t. Hudson was morbidly curious as to why it was that Joseph had appealed to her as a sexual partner- hence her momentary horror at the consideration that he might have raped Rook- but she could hardly start making judgments from her high horse when she’d been willing to enthusiastically fuck the guy that had once nearly broken her wrist with a pair of pliers (among other things) less than three years ago. God, she hoped Joseph had just used that silver tongue of his to talk Rook out of her pants rather than anything more insidious; but if Rook said she consented, then Hudson would have to take her word for it.  
  
“How was it?” Hudson asked weakly, a little reluctant to know the answer. “Birth, I mean.”  
  
There was a pause. “ _It hurt_ ,” Rook said quietly. “ _A lot. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been: Joseph was really calm throughout the whole thing, and he seemed to know what to do. It wasn’t as stressful as I thought it would be._ ”  
  
Somehow Hudson suspected that John would not be so calm when she was in labor. He’d looked close to having a heart-attack when she’d broke the news to him, so God only knew how he’d be when the kid was actually coming out of her. At least he wasn’t going to have to be the one to actually deliver it- Rook seemed to be implying that Joseph had done so for her. “Boy or girl?”  
  
“ _Girl_. _We named her Lydia._ ”  
  
Curiously non-religious name for someone of Joseph’s inclinations; but then, Hudson wouldn’t know if there were any Lydias in the Bible.  
  
“ _Uh, Hudson?_ ”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“… _Joseph wants to talk to you._ ”  
  
Hudson’s insides tightened. “Has he been there the whole time?”  
  
“ _No, he just walked in._ ”  
  
Hudson hoped that was true. She liked to think that Joseph would have the integrity to respect a private conversation between the mother of his child and the soon-to-be mother of his brother’s child.  
  
Of course, Joseph was also convinced God had told him to sanction the kidnapping and torture of innocent people, so maybe it was too much to assume that he adhered to the conventional understandings of ‘respect’.  
  
“Alright,” Hudson said. “Put him on.”  
  
“ _Okay. I’ve- I’ve got to go feed Lydia, Hudson, so I probably won’t be getting back on tonight. I’ll talk to you again when I can_.”  
  
“Of course,” Hudson said softly. “Have a good night, Rook.”  
  
“ _Good night._ ”  
  
There was a pause. Hudson waited, strangely tense; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken directly to Joseph Seed.  
  
Then: “ _Good evening, Deputy Hudson._ ”  
  
Hudson swallowed, and then responded. “Hello, Joseph.” If he thought she was going to call him ‘Father’ he was even crazier than she gave him credit for. She was _not_ calling the older brother of the man she was fucking ‘Father’.  
  
“ _It’s good to hear from you_ ,” Joseph continued. “ _It has been quite a time since we’ve spoken. In any case, I wanted to give my blessing to you and your child, Deputy. I’m happy to know that John has found good company with you._ ”  
  
Hudson’s temper tempted her: _Oh, **good company** , is that what we’re calling this situation? The one where you sent me off with John so he could torture me and force me to confess my ‘sins’? Good to know you’re pleased with how this turned out._  
  
Instead she said, “Thank you. I appreciate that.” She didn’t even clench her teeth too badly when she said it. “I hear congratulations are in order in your direction too.” Hudson said it on impulse; later, she would see nothing accomplished in addressing the fact that she was aware that Joseph and Rook had a baby together.  
  
“ _Thank you_ ,” Joseph said, sounding sincere. “ _Lydia_ _is a beautiful little girl. I’m certain she’ll be delighted to meet her cousin when we emerge for the walk to Eden’s Gate_.” Well, that was a silver-lining if nothing else. “ _Ava and I guard her carefully, and we have been blessed that God has not asked for her before her time, as he did with my previous daughter_.” That sentence struck Hudson as odd: Firstly because she didn’t know Joseph had ever had another child (she’d heard through the grapevine before the attempted arrest that he’d been married, but not that he’d had a child) and secondly because… It was one thing to say ‘Thankfully she’s been healthy’, but ‘Thankfully she hasn’t died’ sounded really _specific._ Was he paranoid about Lydia’s life because of his previous daughter’s death?  
  
“I’m glad she’s safe,” Hudson settled on saying. “And healthy. I hope she stays that way.”  
  
“ _As do I, Deputy._ ”  
  
On her way back to John’s room, Hudson mulled over that conversation in the same persistent way she had when she was investigating things as a Sheriff’s Deputy. There was this little intuition of hers- her “Cop Sense”, as Whitehorse had put it once- that there was more to Joseph’s statement than she was seeing. She could explain it away as a traumatized father being fearful for his new child’s health and safety, but… There was something _off._  
  
“You’re back,” John said with a smile when she stepped into his room. “How was it?”  
  
“Fine,” Hudson said carefully. “It was fine. So you knew that Joseph and Rook had a baby?”  
  
John’s smile weakened. “Joseph implied that Rook didn’t want anyone to know. I was trying to respect their privacy.”

 _Translation: Big Brother said 'jump', and you said 'how high?'_  
  
Hudson nodded quickly, though, and didn't call him on it. “Yeah, that’s fine, I’m not mad about that at all.” She hesitated.  
  
“But?” John asked, apparently sensing that Hudson was holding back.  
  
Hudson took a deep breath. “I didn’t know Joseph had a daughter. Before, I mean.”  
  
In a span of seconds, John’s entire demeanor changed: His eyes widened, his posture tensed, and his complexion grew a little ashy. “He did,” he said, voice hoarse.  
  
_Oh no._  
  
Hudson’s Cop Sense was tingling even harder now. It had told her that something was funny about this situation, and John’s behavior was confirming that in a really _serious_ way. “What happened to her?”  
  
“Where did you hear about this?”  
  
“Joseph told me. He said that he was grateful that God…” Hudson struggled, but then recalled the exact wording. “…He was grateful that God ‘hadn’t _asked_ for Lydia before her time’, like he had with Joseph’s other daughter.”  
  
_God has not **asked** for her before her time._  
  
That was it.  
  
That was the wording that had bothered her.  
  
There were so many pretty, fluffy euphemisms for death where religion was concerned. People ‘passed on’, they ‘went to their rest’, ‘God called them home’, and all of that. But for Joseph, a man who claimed that God was whispering in his ear, started talking about how God had _asked_ for his first daughter and not his second one…  
  
…It took on a totally different meaning.  
  
“John,” Hudson said in a low voice. “What happened to her?”  
  
John got out of his chair, standing up and walking to the other side of the desk, leaning back and resting most of his weight on it. “Joseph’s wife got into an accident when she was about seven months pregnant,” John said quietly. Hudson didn’t miss how much tighter his posture had grown, how blank his expression had gotten; she’d learned over their time together that this was John looked like when he was fighting to keep his emotions in check. “She died, but they were able to save the baby. He… I don’t know if she was formally named, but he calls her Caroline when he talks about her.”  
  
He didn’t continue, and Hudson was suddenly overcome with nausea. She sank down to sit on the bed. “And?” She pressed, even though an insistent little voice in her head was begging her not to ask.  
  
“And,” John continued, flexing his fists anxiously, “Joseph was left alone with her. She was premature, and she was hooked up to a machine to help her breathe.”  
  
Hudson let out a weak, strangled sound. “Jesus Christ, John, what did he do?”  
  
John shut his eyes. “He… He thought God was telling him to…” He swallowed loudly, thickly. “…To _give_ him Caroline.”  
  
John looked at her with a pointed look.  
  
_You know what I mean by **give** ,_ that look said.  
  
Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh _God._  
  
Joseph had killed his daughter.  
  
“ _What_ -”  
  
“That’s why he was sent to prison,” John continued, a pained look on his face. “You know he was in prison for a while. The doctors could tell what he’d done. I’m not even sure he tried to hide it.”  
  
Hudson felt dizzy. “He killed a baby and they let him out?”  
  
John shrugged awkwardly. “I think they took mercy on him. I think they saw a heartbroken husband and father and…” He let out a shaky breath. “…I think they just… Chalked it up to trauma. To a nervous breakdown, and that he snapped under the grief of losing his wife. I feel like maybe they backed off a bit too because it looked bad for them: They left an emotionally unstable guy who’d just lost his wife alone with his fragile, premature newborn, and I think they realized how bad that looked in retrospect.”  
  
Hudson’s breathing was shallow. “Does Rook know?”  
  
John shrugged again. “I don’t know. Joseph’s never exactly _hidden_ that part of his past, so I assume he has, but…”  
  
Hudson reflexively curled an arm around her stomach, feeling a weak fluttering that she had originally believed was indigestion, but was starting to suspect was the baby kicking. It hadn’t even been born yet and she’d already decided she’d strangle its father if he ever behaved aggressively towards it. Joseph had held his daughter in his arms, his daughter who _should have died_ and had been miraculously saved, and he had…  
  
_God_.  
  
Once she’d managed to calm down a little, Hudson turned back to John. “John, look at me. Don’t break eye-contact.” John did so, still looking apprehensive. “Do you genuinely believe that God told your brother to kill his daughter? Or do you think he snapped under the grief?”  
  
John didn’t respond.  
  
“ _John_.”  
  
“I don’t know!” John burst out, tone a mix of anger and fear. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I wasn’t there, I only have Joseph’s word to take for it and…” He turned away from Hudson, holding his head.

 _And Joseph's word is not reliable._  
  
John doubted Joseph.  
  
That was a sight to behold.  
  
With some thought, it wasn’t overly shocking that John was experiencing some cognitive dissonance from this. He was devoted to Joseph in the extreme, ready to believe and obey whatever his brother said without a moment’s hesitation- but smothering a helpless baby was a level of _bad_ that was difficult to justify. If they were going for an Abraham and Isaac comparison, Hudson was tempted to point out that God hadn't actually allowed Abraham to go through with the whole "kill your son" thing. But to Hudson’s ear, it sounded a lot like this was one moment, one issue where John’s faith in his brother’s connection to God was tested.  
  
And clearly it scared the shit out of him.  
  
Because if Joseph had killed his daughter in a fit of grief and attributed it to God telling him to after the fact…  
  
…Then what else had he done under the same logic?  
  
[---]  
  
Hudson needn’t have asked for Rook’s experience with childbirth: She ended up witnessing it first-hand not long after.  
  
Not that she wanted to, of course, but the bunker in general wasn't a place where she found herself doing what she wanted to do.  
  
The revelation that Joseph had killed his daughter- and that Rook was living with and had a baby with a man that had killed his first baby- had done a number on Hudson’s nerves. John’s distress, his surprising unwillingness to cosign what Joseph had done as an acceptable act of obedience to God, had soothed her somewhat, but not enough. The nausea that had gone away began to slip in again, and Hudson found herself suffering from cramping in her stomach and back.  
  
“It’s perfectly normal,” Judith remarked after Hudson had all but been hog-tied and dragged into the infirmary by John for an exam. “Rest more, stay hydrated, and try to stay off your feet. While you’re at it-”  
  
“Judith,” Alice hurried into the room, “We need you, Alma’s ready to push.”  
  
“Ah, of course she is,” Judith grumbled. “Everyone’s getting pregnant at the same time, the load’s becoming unmanageable.”  
  
Hudson nodded, rising to her feet. “I’ll just, y’know, duck out then-”  
  
“Stay,” Judith said, making it sound more like an order than a request. “It’s good for you to see a birth. You’ll be experiencing it in two months anyhow. Alice, go get Isla, Jessie, Pru, and Tilly. They’re closer to their times than not, and I doubt any of them has any clue about what’s coming.”  
  
“Uh…” Hudson was torn. On one hand, she badly did not want or _need_ to see childbirth up-close and personal; unlike John and probably many of the cultists that had been raised in religious homes, she was aware of what childbirth was and what it had the potential to do to a woman’s body when shit went wrong. On the other hand, there was a morbid curiosity in her- the kind of morbid curiosity that might drive a person to open a gross or shocking Youtube video and produced that _immediate_ sense of regret one tended to feel afterwards.  
  
Hudson stayed; partly because Judith insisted and pissing off the most competent midwife in the bunker two months before giving birth was on, as Pratt had put it once, the List of Dumb Shit One Ought Not to Do.  
  
The other Peggies that showed up were all younger than Hudson- most were in their early twenties, whereas Hudson had recently turned thirty. All were pregnant, and all seemed just as uncomfortable watching Alma struggle to give birth as Hudson was. “First baby, right?” A dark-skinned young woman named Isla asked faintly as Alma bellowed in pain during an examination.  
  
“Mm,” Hudson responded, trying not to cringe. “You?”  
  
“Yup.” Isla nodded, biting her lip. “We all are. This is a Thing Judith does with the first-time mothers.”  
  
“She couldn’t have done this _before_ I had a chance to get pregnant?” Hudson asked. “Somehow I feel like I would have been more diligent in keeping my legs shut if I’d gotten to see this first.”  
  
Isla giggled. “I don’t doubt it.”  
  
Over the next hour or two, those phantom pains Hudson had felt months ago for that other woman who’d torn during her birth came back with a vengeance. Judith was a blunt woman, and didn’t seem to have any qualms with narrating exactly what was going on with Alma’s body as she labored. They didn’t really _need_ one, since Judith had set them up where they had a pretty good view of everything that was going on, but she was someone who liked clarity.  
  
“Seems like this one’s a little stuck,” Judith sighed. “Oh well. We’ll have to help him along.”  
  
A younger Peggie, a girl named Jessie that couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, had lost almost all the color in her face and was shaking slightly. She was further along than Hudson, closer to nine months than not from the look of her. “I’m sure everything will be fine,” Hudson assured her, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.  
  
Of course, this was when Alice chose to hand the forceps over to Judith. The midwife fit the first blade of the forceps into the birth canal, and Alma let out a sharp screech of pain; Jessie’s eyes rolled to the back of her head before she collapsed.  
  
“Shit!” Hudson hissed, flinging out an arm to catch the girl before she could hit her head.  
  
“Watch your language,” One of the other girls snapped.  
  
“Shut up, Pru!” Isla spat. She and Hudson kept Jessie semi-upright until two of the other nurses could carry her into another room. “You know,” She muttered to Hudson, “I trust the Father in all things, but it makes me nervous that one day we’ll be expected to survive without stuff like this,” She whispered, lightly rapping the wall with her knuckles. “I know we should be moving away from the technology and behaviors that led to the Collapse, but I feel a little safer knowing my baby will be born down here than in the middle of the woods.”  
  
“Mm, I see your point,” Hudson agreed. Isla was clearly a capital-B Believer, and either didn’t know of Hudson’s origins or assumed that she’d assimilated into the cult by now. Still, Hudson _did_ see her point: Though she did her best to tune out Joseph’s ramblings, it was obvious that Joseph had a real hatred for the modern world and all of the sinful things that came with it.  
  
“I have a list, I have a list!” She remembered Pratt giggling once in the Sheriff’s Department, crossing his legs and shaking his head as he scanned the piece of paper on his lap. “Here we go: He hates the government, he hates cell phones, he hates the cops, he hates psychologists-”  
  
“ _Shocking!_ ” Hudson had exclaimed, a hand over her heart. “Absolutely shocking! I never would have guessed!”  
  
“Let me finish!” Pratt had laughed. “He hates _music-streaming_ -”  
  
“Oh, come on!” Rook had exclaimed.  
  
“-he hates social media, he hates fast food, he hates the _U.S._ _Postal Service_ -”  
  
“We get it,” Whitehorse had called as he’d stepped out of his office, “Joseph Seed hates all the modern conveniences of the world. Don’t you all have something to be doing right now beyond reminding yourselves how batshit the local cult-leader is?”  
  
Hudson remembered that time fondly.  
  
If anyone around her ever knew about that conversation, they’d have a collective stroke and probably throw her into the nuclear winter outside.  
  
Of course, right now the primary concern seemed to be light-headedness. Judith had gotten the forceps in, and now she had a pair of scissors, which she used to cut-  
  
“ _Oh!_ ” Isla cringed and covered her eyes.  
  
This time, Alma’s scream was _blood-curdling_.  
  
And now it was Hudson that was passing out.  
  
Hudson hadn’t fainted like this since the incident at the door during the Collapse. And that time, John had managed to catch her before she could hurt herself. This time, she woke up bruised and aching, head throbbing slightly. She opened her eyes, and then immediately shut them again when the light sent a spike of pain through her skull. Incidentally, she heard John before she saw him.  
  
“Judith,” John was saying, “You know I try not to involve myself in some of the more- uh- _feminine_ aspects of your job, but I’m questioning the wisdom of having women who are literally _weeks away_ from giving birth observe one first-hand.”  
  
“Would you prefer I let them go into it unprepared?”  
  
“I’m saying that maybe the same point could be transmitted without actually _scaring them into labor._ ”  
  
“What?” Hudson sat up slowly, and John immediately rushed to her side. “I’m- I’m not in labor, am I?” It was _way_ too early, there was no way the baby would survive if it was born now.  
  
“No, but Jessie is,” Judith sighed. “Guess the stress of it sent her over the edge.”  
  
Almost on cue, there was a howl of pain from another room.  
  
Hudson swung her legs over the edge of the bed and tried to stand, but John caught her around (what was left of) her waist and held her down. “No. No way. You hit your head, and you need to stay down for a while.” He looked at her pointedly. “Unless you want to go into labor too?”  
  
Hudson decided it would be better to stay down for now.  
  
But when Judith went to check on Jessie’s progress, Hudson grabbed John by the hand and yanked him close. “When I give birth,” She said in a low, quiet voice of forced calm, “There will be you, there will be a midwife, and there will be me. No one who _does not need to be there_ is going to be observing our kid coming out of my vagina. Got it?”  
  
John nodded. “Got it.”  
  
[---]  
  
In the end, it took twelve hours to have the baby.  
  
The contractions had started during morning prayer: The first one was strong enough to make her gasp- not loud enough for everyone to hear, but just loud enough that John’s head whipped towards her. “You alright?” He’d asked quietly.  
  
Hudson shivered with dread, a hand on her stomach. “For now.”  
  
They went back to John’s room, Hudson torn between fear that labor was starting and weary hope that if it was, this fucking pregnancy would be done and over with soon. The pain came and went over the next two hours, until finally Hudson couldn’t deny it anymore: “We should go to the infirmary soon.”  
  
John paled considerably, and then nodded. “Think you’ll be alright while I go let Joseph and some of the lieutenants know what’s going on?”  
  
Hudson nodded. “Yeah. Go ahead.”  
  
Going to the infirmary ramped up her stress considerably. It was no more full than usual, but the lack of privacy bothered her the way it had bothered her when she was sleeping in her cell and could hear the Peggies fucking in the hallway. She didn’t much like the idea that people were going to hear her giving birth, especially since Hudson didn’t delude herself into thinking that she wasn’t going to be screaming in pain at some point (though she hoped to God she wouldn't get whatever complications had led to Alma's unfortunate circumstances). But there was nothing she could do about it, so she did her best to ignore it.  
  
John seemed to be on edge too. He hovered at her side, barely speaking, anxious and twitchy and uncertain as to what he should be doing. It was the height of irony that seeing Hudson bent over in pain from a contraction made him so uncomfortable given their history, but now didn’t really feel like the time to be pointing it out.  
  
“You need to calm down,” Hudson growled at him after a particularly grueling few minutes of back-breaking pain and yet another embarrassingly invasive examination by Judith, who was acting as her midwife. “You’re making me nervous, and I’m nervous enough right now.”  
  
“Sorry,” John muttered, dragging his fingers through his hair compulsively, knocking his sunglasses off.  
  
Hudson caught them, shaking her head as she handed them back to him. “I don’t know why you still wear these. We haven’t seen the sun in almost three years.”  
  
John shrugged awkwardly. “I don’t know. Makes things feel normal.”  
  
Hudson could sympathize; it had been three years, and she still maintained and occasionally wore her Deputy’s uniform during her duties in the bunker. It was probably part of the reason why some of the Peggies were still wary of her. But it was comforting to have something (really, the _only_ thing she had) from before. Things just kept changing, and sometimes it felt like clinging to any semblance of normalcy from before was the only thing keeping her from losing her shit.  
  
Hours passed. The pain and pressure got worse, and exhaustion was setting in.  
  
John sat behind her, holding her up as she pushed. Hudson would have felt worse about screaming into his ear for a solid hour if she were not currently regretting every moment she allowed his baby-making parts anywhere near her baby-making parts, because surely a few minutes of pleasure did not pay out to the intense agony she was currently experiencing.  
  
“We are never having sex again,” Hudson growled as the baby’s head sat at a full-crown and she was gut-wrenchingly terrified that she was about to experience first-hand what ‘tearing from her V to her A’ felt like. “Ever. Once this fucking kid is out I am duct-taping my legs shut and we are _never_ going to **_FUCK!_** ”  
  
“Head’s out!” Judith reported cheerfully.  
  
Hudson slumped back against John, panting. “You’re doing well,” He said, almost meekly.  
  
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I was fantasizing about doing to your dick just now.”  
  
John squeezed her hand, kissed her shoulder, and wisely kept his mouth shut.  
  
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” Hudson yelped as the contractions redoubled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, _please just pull it out!_ ”  
  
“I’m trying; you need to keep pushing!”  
  
Hudson bore down as another scream tore its way from her throat. Judith was pulling at her and the baby, trying carefully to maneuver it out without hurting it or Hudson, and that only added to how goddamn _painful_ this was. Hudson crushed John’s hand in her own and shrieked again, straining as hard as she could-  
  
-something really _moved_.  
  
Hudson felt a strange emptiness, and she opened her eyes and looked down, blinking at the sting of sweat and tears in her eyes.  
  
The baby was out; Judith had it, and she gave it a cursory toweling-off before handing it to Hudson, who received it with shaking arms. “Holy shit,” She whispered as the baby wailed and squirmed, bringing it cautiously to rest against her chest.  
  
“A sweet little girl for you,” Judith said warmly, patting Hudson’s leg. “She looks good and healthy to me.”  
  
“Thank you,” Hudson mumbled, unable to take her eyes off the baby. Something warm touched her shoulder; abruptly Hudson remembered John, who was still sitting behind her, who still had his arms around her. His face was pressing into her shoulder, and- yup, he was crying. “You alright, John?”  
  
John nodded weakly, a little croaking sound coming from his throat. He leaned in and kissed Hudson’s cheek, one hand coming up to stroke the baby’s head.  
  
“Never thought I’d see the day where you’d be lost for words,” Hudson chuckled.  
  
They stayed like that for a while, even while Hudson went through the ever-glorious experience of delivering the after-birth.  
  
(“Oh God, it’s like I just spat out one of my organs,” She’d groaned as Judith carried it off.  
  
“It was pretty gross,” John had agreed hoarsely, looking a little green.)  
  
But eventually, after she’d been cleaned up and seated a bit more comfortably, Hudson was feeling a bit better; sore as _fuck_ (though probably nowhere near what Alma had felt after her delivery, thank Christ), but better. With the baby cleaned of all the nasty fluids and gunk she’d been coated in, she looked a lot more like a baby and less like the pale little gremlin she’d appeared to be before. She also seemed to have been born with a full head of hair that, when it was sufficiently dry, seemed to have a reddish tint to it.  
  
“Holy crap,” John muttered, seated beside Hudson on the bed with his arm around her shoulders. “I’d be having some really ugly suspicions about you and Jacob if he wasn’t stuck in a bunker miles away from us.”  
  
Hudson chuckled. “Red hair’s a recessive trait. _You_ gave her this; not Jacob, and not me.”  
  
John rolled his eyes. “I suppose Jacob will be thrilled to hear he’s no longer the lone ginger in the family.”  
  
“He might already not be. We don’t know what Lydia looks like.” Hudson stroked the baby’s arm. She was quiet now, but not asleep: She looked up at Hudson with large, dark eyes- and Hudson couldn’t tell if they were brown, or if maybe the baby had inherited her dark gray ones. “So, names. Got any ideas for names?” Maybe it sounded strange, but they hadn’t actually discussed it before.  
  
John hummed thoughtfully. “How do you feel about ‘Evangeline’?”  
  
Evangeline… Hudson wasn’t an expert on linguistics, but ‘Evangeline’ sounded similar to ‘Evangelize’, and so she assumed that the name had a similar meaning to the word. If it did, it was obvious why John favored it. It was pretty, but a bit of a mouthful; of course, ‘Eve’, ‘Eva’, and ‘Evie’ were all viable nicknames. Hudson could count on one hand the number of people throughout her life that had regularly addressed her as Josephine instead of Joey. And hell, her own name had a distinctly religious origin as well, so why not her kid?  
  
“Sure. I’m probably gonna call her Evie, though.”  
  
“That works too.”  
  
[---]  
  
Things after Evie’s birth were… Good.  
  
Or, as good as they could get while raising a baby in a bunker with a nuclear apocalypse above.  
  
John was a partner. A _good_ partner, at that. Regardless of their past, regardless of how things had started between them, they worked well together managing the bunker and they worked even better together as parents. And that was good, because fuck only knew how Hudson would be coping if she had to do this alone.  
  
The first year of Evie’s life had been an endless game of ‘how do we keep a baby alive’. Hudson had nearly laughed herself into an aneurysm when she found out that John had sheepishly contacted Jacob over the radio for advice on how to change a diaper. “You have _dozens_ of people in this bunker with children!” She’d howled. “Why not ask one of them?!”  
  
“I didn’t _want_ to ask one of them,” John had grumbled. “I wanted to ask _Jacob_.” He’d sullenly changed Evie’s diaper as Hudson curled up on the bed, prostrate with hysterical laughter.  
  
They were both somewhat clueless about babies. John had never been in a position of having to care for one, and neither had Hudson. But this shared lack of knowledge bonded them in a way: Neither resented the other for knowing more than they did, and there was a dark sort of humor in realizing, at the same time, that putting a towel or rag over their shoulders _before_ burping a baby would save them another laundry trip.  
  
It was a learning-curve. They could have been doing much worse.  
  
The second year of Evie’s life had been a lesson in how the Terrible Twos were not simply parental folklore.  
  
Evie was just past her second birthday. Hudson returned to their room to hear wailing inside; upon opening the door, she found not just Evie shrieking on her bed in the midst of a tantrum, but _John_ sitting on the floor with his head in his hands, face red and eyes watery.  
  
“I don’t know what to do,” John gasped, sounding a lot like he was having trouble breathing. Hudson knelt down beside him and wrapping an arm around him. “I don’t know how to calm her down. I don’t know how to make her stop without-” He couldn’t finish his sentence.  
  
Hudson was unspeakably relieved. If it was a choice between John having a nervous breakdown or lashing out and harming their daughter, she obviously favored the former over the latter. That he’d successfully resisted the impulse to discipline her the way he had been disciplined as a child (if you could call what his parents had done to him ‘discipline’) did nothing but elevate him in Hudson’s eyes. “It’s okay,” She soothed, rubbing his back as he gulped down air like a drowning man, “It’s okay. It’s okay to be freaked out. This is what kids do. You can discipline her without scaring her or hurting her.”  
  
“ _How?_ ”  
  
Hudson took a deep breath. “I’ll show you.”  
  
(Thank _fuck_ that she’d been a fan of Supernanny before the Collapse.  
  
Being a cop helped too.)  
  
Hudson had put Evie in time-out, made her sit in the corner and let her scream her little lungs out until she was ready to be calm and behave herself again. “Apologize to daddy,” Hudson ordered pointedly once she was coherent enough to understand. “You made him sad when you were misbehaving.” Evie did so by crawling onto his lap and cuddling him, and John finally seemed to calm down. “You can discipline her without going too far, John,” Hudson whispered, even though Evie was far too young to understand what they were talking about. “And you need to. Not giving her any discipline at all isn’t going to help her any more than… Doing to her what your parents did to you. She needs boundaries, or she’s not going to make it up there.” She glanced up at the ceiling; the outside was only two years away now, and if Evie was going to survive she had to be able to follow their instructions at a moment’s notice. “You just have to keep your temper under control. You can speak to her firmly without screaming at her. You can pick her up and put her in time-out without hurting her.”  
  
“I know,” John whispered, gently unknotting a little tangle in Evie’s hair. “I just…”  
  
He didn’t need to say it.  
  
Hudson had admitted when she was pregnant that she was starting to feel a strong sense of affection towards John, something stronger than mere friendship. But now, regardless of any lingering reservations, it was pointless to deny that she loved him. If she hadn’t before, the obvious care he was taking to avoid repeating what had been done to him to their daughter had sealed the deal. It would have been easy enough for John to spank Evie, to slap her or scream at her and defend himself with ‘spare the rod spoil the child, God commands obedience, it was done to me and I turned out fine, this will make her tougher in the long-run’ bullshit; but he didn’t. He was making a conscious choice to behave differently, and Hudson both noticed and appreciated it.  
  
Year three was much like year two; except that now Evie was old enough and smart enough to start asking difficult questions.  
  
Questions that wouldn’t have been difficult if the world were still normal.  
  
“What’s a house?”  
  
Hudson’s eyes popped open slightly with surprise; she nearly dropped her notebook. “What, honey?”  
  
“What’s a _house?_ ” Evie was playing with her little doll, something that Hudson had carefully crafted together out of discarded material from the sewing room. She was proud of it, but she still cringed to compare it in her mind to the dolls she’d played with as a little girl. “Daddy said he’d make me a house for Mimi. What’s a _house?_ ”  
  
“Uh-” Fuck. How was Hudson supposed to contextualize something like a house for Evie, who’d only ever known the inside of this bunker? “Well… You remember how Uncle Joseph talks on the radio about how we’re going to go outside one day?”  
  
“Mm,” Evie nodded, maybe a little too easily for Hudson to take her at face-value.  
  
“Well, houses are something that- that are outside.” Hudson had struggled for a moment, wondering if she should say they _are_ outside, or if they _were_ outside. She liked to think some places were still standing- The Spread Eagle, the Prison, maybe some other buildings- but she didn’t know if any houses would. “They’re buildings-”  
  
“What’s a building?”  
  
“Um…” Hudson bit her lip, sinking down to the floor to sit beside Evie. “They’re… They’re like this.” She gestured to the room around them. “Like the bunker.”  
  
“What’s a bunker?”  
  
“ _This_ is the bunker,” Hudson pressed. She’d had conversations with Sharky Boshaw and Hurk Jr., both drunk as all hell, that had stressed her out less than this. “All of the places you’ve ever been since you were born- those are all in the bunker. It’s an underground building.”  
  
Evie was quiet for a moment. “But a bunker’s not a house.”  
  
“No. Bunkers are built underground, and houses are built aboveground. Bunkers are built out of metal-” Hudson rapped her knuckles on the floor. “-and houses are built out of wood, like the wood the desk is made out of.” She reached over and tapped the leg of the desk.  
  
Evie stared at Hudson quietly. Hudson had been right: Evie had inherited her dark gray eyes, and when she wasn’t falling prey to the usual tantrums of toddlerhood, they had the effect of making her appear very serious. “People live in them?” She asked. “Like bunkers?”  
  
“Yes. People usually live in houses rather than bunkers.”  
  
“Why do we live in a bunker and not a house?”  
  
Hudson felt like she’d fallen into a trap- which was ridiculous, because Evie wasn’t nearly old enough to set one up for her (though, God help them all, if she developed her father’s intellect she’d be a force to be reckoned with one day). “Because we had to, honey.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because it was too dangerous to stay aboveground.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because a lot of bad things happened aboveground and it wasn’t safe to live up there.”  
  
“What bad things?”  
  
Hudson sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Bad things… Bad things that you’ll learn about when you’re older.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because some things you can only learn when you’re older, honey.”  
  
Evie hesitated.  
  
Hudson knew what was coming before she even said it:  
  
“Why?”  
  
Later, John thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Why not redirect her?” He giggled softly as Evie slept. If there was anything they had _truly_ been blessed with, it was that Evie slept like a damn rock. “I don’t want to sound like an asshole, Joey, but she’s three: She has the attention-span of a goldfish. Distract her with something else and she’ll forget soon enough.”  
  
“I feel _bad_ ,” Hudson whispered in response. “I don’t want to lie to her. I want to be honest.”  
  
“Save the honesty for when she’s actually old enough to remember it. In twenty years she’s not going to remember this conversation.”  
  
Maybe Evie wouldn’t.  
  
But as year four progressed, it became obvious that she was becoming more and more curious about her surroundings- and what lay beyond them.  
  
“Uncle Joseph said we’re gonna go outside in a few months,” Evie said at dinner one night, staring up at John in that intense way of hers.  
  
“Yes, we will.”  
  
“All of us?”  
  
“Some people will go out first,” Hudson cut in quickly, giving John a pointed look, “To make sure it’s safe for the rest of us to go out. Then we can go outside.”  
  
“Are we going to visit Uncle Joseph?”  
  
“Yes,” John said, fork tapping his plate. He and Hudson had learned the fine art of timing bites of food between Evie’s questions. “We’re going to visit Uncle Joseph and Aunt Ava-”  
  
“And Lydia,” Evie pressed.  
  
“Yes,” John conceded with a smile, “And Lydia. You’re also going to get to meet your Uncle Jacob and Aunt Faith.”  
  
“And Uncle Staci, and Uncle Cameron.” It felt a little weird to assign such an intimate label to Burke, who Hudson admittedly didn’t know too well; but hell, Evie wouldn’t suffer from another family member, and Burke sure wouldn’t suffer from a family-tie when he had so few already. “You’re gonna get to meet a lot of people.”  
  
“And we’re going to see the sun.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And trees.”  
  
“Yes.” John gave Hudson a look at that, but she waved a hand; there were trees visible from the bunker door. She promised Evie trees, not a forest.  
  
“And animals.”  
  
“Maybe,” John said quickly. “Maybe. A lot of them might have been scared away during the Collapse-”  
  
“-when the bad stuff happened,” Evie interrupted.  
  
“Yes, when the bad stuff happened. Many of them might have been scared away, and even if there are any around when we go outside, they may be scared and run away from us.”  
  
“Because we might eat them?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Will we?”  
  
“Some of them, probably.” The only animals in the bunker were a handful of dogs and cats, as well as a limited number of cows and pigs in a wing designed for food and milk production. Evie wasn’t ignorant about where their meat came from, but she had yet to spend enough time around a cow or a pig to see how cute they were, to get unwisely attached to one before it was killed. Hudson wasn’t looking forward to that future meltdown.  
  
Evie tapped her fork against her plate until John placed a hand on hers wordlessly. When he took it away, she didn’t tap again. “And once we’re outside, we’re staying outside? Forever?”  
  
John and Hudson hesitated, exchanging a look. Most of Evie’s questions had an air of skepticism to them, like she didn’t _quite_ believe what they were telling her. Understandable: She had never seen trees or sunlight before (Hudson didn’t feel it was right to taunt her with the outside by taking her to the window at the main door; if Evie saw it, she’d want to go to it). But those were easy concepts, because _yes_ they would see trees, and _yes_ they would see animals and sunlight.  
  
But ‘we’re leaving the only place you’ve ever known and won’t be coming back to it’ was a concept she could grasp a little better.  
  
“We’ll come back,” Hudson said, glancing between Evie and John. “Right?”  
  
John hesitated. “Yes,” He said slowly, “Yes, we’ll come back now and then.”  
  
Evie nodded, satisfied. “Good,” She said.  
  
Year four came and went.  
  
And then, finally- _finally_ \- it came time to leave the bunker.


	4. Chapter 4

“Holy _shit._ ”  
  
John squeezed her hand, eyes wide. “It’s… A lot more colorful than I thought it would be.”  
  
Patches of land were dark and charred, probably still irradiated from the bombs.  
  
But the rest of it was very much alive.  
  
The grass was as green as it had been before the bombs; there were fields of purple and yellow flowers, and while the forest had not returned to its full state, many of the trees had re-grown and looked perfectly normal. And the sky… The sky had a strange sort of aurora-borealis thing going on, ribbons of green and orange twisting through the dark of the early-morning sky.  
  
“It’s pretty!” Evie squealed, bouncing in Hudson’s arms. “It’s so pretty! You didn’t say it was so pretty!”  
  
“It wasn’t like this before,” Hudson told her, a little mystified. “Not _exactly_.”  
  
“It must be a super bloom,” John said. “The land was destroyed by the fire, then dead for a while with the winter; now what’s survived or transformed by the radiation is coming back in patches like this.” He shook his head. “Well, Joseph did say it would be beautiful after it was ravaged.”  
  
The mention of Joseph’s name made Hudson clutch Evie a little tighter. She was eager to see Rook, but considerably less eager to see Joseph, regardless of what he was in relation to Rook, or to John- and by association, Hudson. “Off we go, then?”  
  
John nodded. “Off we go.”  
  
The ride was smoother than it could have been. The roads weren’t fabulous, but the trucks that had been hidden away in the bunkers had been built to withstand rough terrain. Hudson kept Evie on her lap even though her cop-senses knew it would be better to buckle her in. She’d craved the outside world for so long, for the world outside the bunker, but it occurred to her now that this was not the world she had anticipated returning to. “What are those?” Evie asked, pointing to the window.  
  
Hudson looked, and then started; the animals were reminiscent of deer, but they were pure white with pink-red antlers. A few watched as the trucks rolled by while the others scattered away from the road.  
  
The old compound, where they’d tried to arrest Joseph- it was _fucked_. It was flooded to hell and back, and all of the buildings save for the church had been blown to hell and were half-sunk into the water. The trucks that had already arrived had to pull over to the side of the road, and as Hudson followed her feet sank in the wet dirt. “Joseph and Jacob might be in the church. I don’t see any of Faith’s people, so she might not be here yet.” John said. He hesitated for a moment, eyes sliding to Hudson. “You know, if you want to look around for Rook, Pratt, or Burke- I can take Evie.”  
  
Hudson hesitated. She _did_ want to look around for them, but was leery about Evie being near Joseph without her.  
  
_She won’t be alone. Shell be with John_ , Hudson assured herself. _If Joseph did want to hurt her…_  
  
Well, as much as she second-guessed herself, she had every reason to suspect that Evie might be the one thing John would choose over Joseph.  
  
“Alright,” She said, forcing a smile. “Alright.”  
  
Evie seemed confused as she was passed between her parents. “Mommy?”  
  
“It’s fine,” Hudson assured her quickly. “I’ll be right here. I’m just going to look for some people. You and daddy are going to go meet Uncle Joseph.”  
  
Evie frowned. It did something really _ugly_ to Hudson inside to see conflict on her sweet little face; it wasn’t often that they’d been parted for any significant period of time since Evie had been born, but at least when they had Evie knew where Hudson was or where she could be found if necessary. Maybe it was that she felt less secure in this unfamiliar environment.  
  
John seemed to have cottoned on to that faster than Hudson. He gave Evie a little squeeze, smiling. “It’s alright,” He said, “You know our room? We’ll be closer to mommy than if she was there and we were in the cafeteria.” They waited as Evie processed that. Then she nodded, slowly and reluctantly. “Okay.”  
  
Hudson kept a smile on until they were far enough away, and then let out a shaky sigh. She was lucky: A lot of women- pre-Collapse, anyway- would’ve killed to have the free time she’d had with Evie. If it had been pre-Collapse, Hudson knew she wouldn’t have quit the Sheriff’s Department; she loved her job.  
  
Of course, pre-Collapse, she wouldn’t have fucked John Seed and had his kid either, so it was a moot point.  
  
Hudson paced around the assembled Peggies. It wasn’t hard to see why John had assumed Jacob was present: The men and women assembled around the other set of trucks and jeeps were much more rugged and wild-looking than the ones from their bunker, and many of them wore the distinct outfits of the Chosen.  
  
“Joey?”  
  
Hudson’s mouth fell open when she recognized the man sitting on the closest Jeep’s hood. “ _Staci!_ ” She flew at him, throwing her arms around him and squeezing him tightly. When they parted, she looked Pratt up and down. In reality he hadn’t changed all that much- his hair was a little shorter, his beard was a little fuller, and he’d clearly been working out- but he wasn’t wearing his uniform, and… There was something in his posture that was different than before. He had a different demeanor than the one Hudson remembered and associated with Deputy Staci Pratt.  
  
“It’s good to see you,” Pratt chuckled. “Shit, I missed you.”  
  
“I missed you too,” Hudson sighed. “You’ve put on some muscle. Not the stringy little loser I remember.”  
  
Pratt snorted. “It’s been, what, almost nine years now and you’re still gonna rub that _one_ arm-wrestling match in my face? Vindictive as ever, Joey.”  
  
“You know it.” She looked around. “Is Jacob in with Joseph?”  
  
Pratt shook his head. “There was some sort of freakish-looking bear prowling around the forest on the way here. He took a couple of the Chosen to get a better look at it.” He leaned in. “There were some _fucked up_ animals in the Whitetails- or what’s left of them. They were covered in… Moss, I think, and there were parts of them that were glowing, almost like they had lava in them. The hell did they hit us with?”  
  
Hudson could only shrug.  
  
Not long after, Faith’s trucks rolled up, and the Seed sister stepped out of hers as neat and pristine as she’d been before the Collapse. Burke emerged from the truck too, looking much like he had when she’d met him seven years ago. He approached Hudson and Pratt with a wry smile. “Hey. Good to see you.”  
  
“Good to see you too,” Hudson greeted, hesitantly stepping forward to give him a quick hug. She wasn’t the touchy-feely sort, but she appreciated that Burke hadn’t had the privilege of emerging from a bunker and reentering familiar surroundings, as they had. Even if seeing the remnants of Hope County hurt, at least she knew the land.  
  
“You, uh, you leave the kiddo at home?”  
  
“She’s with John. He should be at the church with Joseph, I’m not sure what-”  
  
Something collided with Hudson, something human-shaped that wrapped around her and nearly lifted her off the ground with excitement. Pratt’s face lit up. “Rook!” He cheered, raising his arms in triumph.  
  
Hudson let out a laugh and spun around to throw her arms around Rook. She hadn’t changed much at all: The only noticeable difference was slightly longer hair that she kept in the same ponytail she’d always worn before. “I’m so glad to see you!” Rook squealed, jumping on Burke first, then Pratt. “It’s been so long. Too long. God, I’ve only seen two faces in the last seven years. It’s overwhelming to see you all again.”  
  
“Is Lydia here?” Rook asked.  
  
“She’s with Joseph.”  
  
Well, hell: That meant everyone who was biologically a Seed was present today.  
  
“So…” Burke began slowly, before he pointed to Rook. “You’re with Joseph.” Then to Hudson. “You’re with John.” He rotated towards Pratt, an eyebrow raised questioningly. “And you’re…?”  
  
Pratt did not answer, shuffling in place.  
  
Hudson, Rook, and Burke stared at him.  
  
Pratt’s cheeks colored. “I swear to God-”  
  
“Oh my God, you are _fucking_ Jacob,” Hudson intoned. Burke let out a choked laugh, looking away and turning it into a cough.  
  
Pratt’s jaw dropped. “Ex- _cuse_ me? Who am I hearing this from again? Which of us has children with a Seed brother again?”  
  
“Yeah,” Rook said, obviously trying to avoid a laughing fit, “But it’s _Jacob._ ”  
  
“Ah, fuck you guys.”  
  
“So… I mean, none of us are actually married, but I guess this kind of makes us in-laws,” Hudson said.  
  
Rook smiled. “I’m okay with that.”  
  
Pratt shrugged. “I’ve had worse family-members.”  
  
“If you like. Faith and I aren’t, uh…” Burke gave an awkward shrug. “…We’re friendly. That’s all. Never went further than that, and it won’t in the future.” He seemed pretty certain about it.  
  
“It’s alright,” Rook said, “I still told Lydia to call you ‘Uncle’ anyway.”  
  
“Same,” Hudson offered.  
  
“Cool. That’s… Thanks.” Burke turned away from them, blinking rapidly. Rook smiled and gave him a half-hug, one arm wrapped around him, before disappearing to find Joseph and Lydia.  
  
When she returned- John and Evie at their heels- Rook was trailed by a little shadow of a girl who seemed too shy to do more than pop her head out from behind her mother’s legs. Lydia, incidentally, was not a red-head: She had Joseph’s dark brown hair, but Rook’s gray-blue eyes. Lydia was even quieter than Evie, far more reserved and obviously more anxious at being above-ground. That didn’t seem unreasonable: She’s spent the entirety of her life in a safe and confined space with people she knew and trusted, so the outside world with its strange new faces must have seemed obscenely large and intimidating by comparison.  
  
“Lydia,” Evie twittered as she hopped around John’s legs, trying to goad her cousin out from behind Rook. “Lydia, Lydia…” For her part, Lydia did seem tempted- but she chose to stay close to her mother.  
  
“I think she’s tired, Evie,” Hudson said quietly. “Let her be for now.”  
  
It was at that moment that Jacob and his Chosen emerged from the woods. They weren’t dragging a giant monster-bear corpse behind them, and that was good, because poor little Lydia would probably have a stroke from the added stress. “We found it,” He said by way of greeting to Pratt, giving no outward indicators that they were anything more than comrades or coworkers; but then, Jacob had never struck Hudson as the sort who was fond of PDA. “ _Big_ bastard. Had the same thing as the cougars we saw, but on the belly instead of the throat. Little brother!” Jacob threw an arm around John and clapped him on the back. “Good to see you. Joseph and Faith in the church? I figured as much. Hey now…” Jacob stopped when he saw Evie and Lydia, a grin splitting his face as he knelt down, “These two must be my nieces.”  
  
Lydia shrank back further behind Rook, probably intimidated by Jacob’s size. Evie stayed between John and Hudson, but smiled and observed Jacob with the wary interest of a child who was being paid attention by a parent-sanctioned stranger. “Hi,” Evie greeted shyly.  
  
“You got hair like mine, huh?” Jacob tugged what little hair he had.  
  
“No,” Evie responded politely, “I have more of it.”  
  
Jacob busted up laughing. “You do, kid, you do.” Either Jacob had changed as much as Pratt- the Jacob Hudson remembered had all the charm of a sledgehammer to the jaw- or there were depths to him she’d never seen before as someone who was Not Family. “How about you, honey?” Jacob asked Lydia. “I’m not gonna eat you.”  
  
Judging from the look on her face, Lydia suspected that to be a lie.  
  
Faith appeared on the path from the church, followed closely by Joseph. Once the other Peggies saw him coming, a hush fell over their assembly even as he hugged and quietly greeted Jacob. Eventually he came to stand by Rook’s side; she was calm, not minding at all how close he was to her, but Hudson noticed that Pratt and Burke were a little tenser than they’d been before. Hudson probably was too- for all those sermons, for that brief conversation they’d had over the radio, it was hard to let go of the memory of Joseph standing on the hood of that truck and sanctioning the Reaping.  
  
Fear died hard.  
  
In contrast, however, Hudson noticed that Lydia immediately took Joseph’s hand and pulled him closer to her and Rook, using them almost as a cocoon. _Well, at least Joseph’s a good enough dad that his daughter feels safe with him_ , she thought.  
  
“My children,” Joseph said, with a beatific smile. “My family. God has cleansed the Earth: Welcome to our new dawn.”  
  
[---]  
  
Not too long after the bunkers were opened, Hudson found herself pregnant again.  
  
This one, incidentally, was mentally and emotionally easier than the first. Or at least it was for Hudson: John, on the other hand, turned into the same nervous freak that he’d been when she was pregnant with Evie. He practically pushed Hudson back into the bunker once they realized she was expecting, muttering about radiation and how delicate babies were. Hudson had anticipated that going back into the bunker long-term would be harder now than it had been before, but she was surprised to find it wasn’t: The time she would spend in the bunker this time around had a measureable, predictable beginning and ending; and if she really started losing it, all she had to do was go up to the door and stand outside for a few minutes.  
  
Evie spent most of her time in the bunker with Hudson. John had offered to keep her mostly aboveground with him, but Hudson had declined. “I can handle her,” She assured him. “Besides, it’ll help her transition if she can come back here for a while.”  
  
That being said, that same anxiety Evie had expressed at being separated from Hudson manifested itself twofold once the arrangement was in place: Once she realized that John was going back out into the world, a significant and (for her) unreachable distance, she let out a high keening sound, a whine that began to devolve into wild sobbing when he actually tried to leave. “It’s okay, I’ll calm her down,” Hudson said as John’s face crumpled. “Seriously- she needs to learn that we can go away and come back. It’s good for her in the long-run, John.”  
  
John still hesitated, and damn it, Hudson sort of loved him for it. “You’re sure?”  
  
“Yes,” Hudson insisted calmly as she pried Evie off his leg. “She’ll be fine. She will live.”  
  
John left.  
  
And Evie did live, though she acted like she wanted to die for a solid four hours (all of which were spent screaming and crying). Eventually she calmed down and Hudson fed her. “Daddy will come back,” She told her calmly. “Mommies and daddies did this all the time before the Collapse. They left and came home after a while, and everything was fine.”  
  
Obviously that wasn’t a hundred percent true, but fuck if Hudson was going to ruin the silence by trying to teach a four year-old about nuance.  
  
Slowly but surely, Evie’s freak-outs grew less intense when the trade-offs happened. Eventually she began to figure out that no, Hudson would not disappear into the ether when Evie couldn’t see her anymore; and likewise, John would not blow away with the wind when he went to build up the settlement with the others. They could and would come back- usually in one piece, too.  
  
“I didn’t think anything could be worse than an angry grizzly bear,” John whispered to Hudson one night as he peeled his shirt aside and showed her his bandaged side, “But the wolverines have gotten a _thousand_ times worse than they were before. It tried to disembowel me, Joey. It was the same size as a _cat_ , Joey.”  
  
Meanwhile, this pregnancy was shaping up to be considerably less intrusive than the previous one had been. Hudson’s symptoms weren’t as strong this time, which was a blessing considering that she already had a child to wrangle. Evie was hardly a problem-child, but it was far easier to distract her when Hudson didn’t feel the need to run for the bathroom and puke.  
  
But Hudson was alone the day Rook came to the bunker.  
  
“Joseph has Lydia,” She said. “I assume John has Evie?”  
  
“He does.”  
  
“Wanna go for a walk?”  
  
Winter was coming to a graceful close, and spring was setting into Hope County. Those wild vibrant flowers they’d seen when they’d emerged from the bunkers in September were popping to life again, painting the valley in colors Hudson wouldn’t have expected from the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. She and Rook walked in silence for a while, occasionally noting some unusual plant or animal in the distance. Eventually Hudson asked, “Was there something you wanted to talk about, Ava?”  
  
“…No. You?” Rook sounded like she was holding something back. But Hudson…  
  
…Hudson definitely had a question.  
  
“We didn’t get to talk about it, really,” She began awkwardly. “Over the radio, I mean. Not a lot of privacy there. But, uh… How did you and Joseph…?”  
  
Rook froze, eyes widening.  
  
“I’m not judging,” Hudson said quickly. “I mean-” She spread her arms, nodded to her stomach. “-I’m cooking baby number two with his little brother. I’m just curious what went down between you.”  
  
For a moment she was perfectly still, and Hudson was getting worried. And then, finally, she said, “Did you know Joseph had another daughter? Before Lydia?”  
  
Hudson tensed too. “John told me about it.”  
  
“Everything?”  
  
Hudson swallowed. “Yeah. Everything.”  
  
“Oh, thank God.” Rook let out a weak, half-hysterical sob. “You know already, I don’t have to…” She pressed the side of her hand to her nose and breathed for a moment, trying to reel herself back in. “It was so overwhelming,” She whispered. “The arrest, and the crash, and escaping and fighting and getting caught and the bombs and…” She shook her head. “…And then, I don’t know, after a couple of weeks of being alone in the bunker with Joseph, I think I just- snapped? He was shirtless and I was keyed up and I started kissing him and…” Rook covered her face with her hands. “God, it’s so embarrassing now. I really threw myself at him.”  
  
“People have done dumber things under pressure,” Hudson assured her.  
  
“It wasn’t a good idea, though,” Rook pressed. “I got pregnant _so_ quickly, and that was another thing to throw on the stress-pile. I didn’t think I’d be having kids so young, especially not with a man I barely knew, barely _liked_. After Lydia was born, I was just really… Really _low_.” Rook started to choke up. “Joseph was really good about it, he let me rest and took great care of her, better than I was taking care of her, but it was all so overwhelming and I just… I didn’t _bond_ with her, and I started wishing she was never born. I even once started to wonder if maybe I should… Just…” A sob escaped her.  
  
Hudson got the gist.  
  
She put her arms around Rook’s shoulders, hugging her tightly. “It’s okay,” She whispered. “It’s okay. You’re not the first woman who’s had those thoughts. Not even close.”  
  
“I _know_ ,” Rook croaked. “But I felt like such a fucking _monster_ because I resented her for being so needy and I hated myself for feeling that way because it wasn’t her fault, _I_ was the idiot that threw myself at Joseph and got pregnant.”  
  
“Does Joseph know you’ve had these thoughts?”  
  
“Yeah,” Rook nodded, “I broke down and told him eventually. I was so scared that he’d judge me for it, but he didn’t. He tried really hard to calm me down- he made me this tea, I don’t know what was in it, but… It might have been drugged? I don’t know, I just know that I felt a little better after I drank it. Calmer.”  
  
“Do you still _have_ those thoughts?”  
  
“No,” Rook said, shaking her head emphatically. “Well, I still get a little depressed from time to time, but nothing like before. Eventually the bad thoughts calmed down a little, and Lydia and I bonded as she got a little older. Joseph told me it might just take time for me to connect with her, that maybe she needed to develop a little more of a personality before I could, and he was right. I’m so _fucking_ relieved, Joey, because I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself if I didn’t love her.” She shakily wiped her eyes. “But that’s why I can’t resent Joseph for what happened with his first daughter, Joey. How can I judge him for that when I almost did the same thing to Lydia?”  
  
Hudson saw her point, even if she was wary to compare the two situations. Still, she hated that Rook had to deal with this only with Joseph for support. She wished Rook had opened up to her over the radio, even though she understood why she hadn’t. ‘I’ve contemplated killing my baby’ isn’t something anyone wants to admit out loud, never mind over a radio frequency anyone could be listening in on. “So you warmed up to him eventually?”  
  
“Yeah,” Rook sighed heavily, trying to put herself together again. “What can I say? He treated me well. He treated Lydia well.” She hesitated. “I can’t say he’s a sterling example of what mankind has to offer, but… I do love him. And even if I didn’t, at this point it would do more harm to Lydia than not to separate from him. We’re the only two people she knew for the first six years of her life.” Rook looked to Hudson sadly. “I think you understand.”  
  
“Yeah,” Hudson said wearily. “Yeah, I do.”  
  
[---]  
  
Faith and Burke were visiting the bunker the day Hudson went into labor.  
  
Thankfully, John had stuck close to home the closer she’d gotten to the end of the pregnancy, and she wasn’t alone when her water broke. They left Evie with a slightly flustered Burke and went to the infirmary.  
  
“You know,” Faith said, almost conspiratorially, “I have some Bliss with me. Take a little, and the next thing you know you’ll have your baby in your arms with little to no memory of the hard parts.”  
  
“Uh,” Hudson smiled weakly, hoping Faith mistook her hesitation for a contraction, “No, no thanks, Faith. Think I’ll go au natural for this one.”  
  
“You sure?” John whispered out of the corner of his mouth a few minutes later. “Bliss can numb the pain.”  
  
“Sure,” Hudson said through clenched teeth as another contraction gripped her, “And the baby can come out stoned and have to spend the first few hours of his life detoxing from it.” John didn’t respond, and Hudson sighed. “Please tell me that occurred to you. Please tell me I’m not the first person who’s warned you against using a hallucinogenic drug as a painkiller for pregnant women, especially during labor.”  
  
“Of course not,” John mumbled, not looking at her.  
  
Hudson rolled her eyes.  
  
Thankfully, everything about this birth was about fifty percent more tolerable than the first, which negated the necessity for any illicit drugs: It lasted half the time, the contractions never became _quite_ as painful as they’d been before, and both the baby and the afterbirth came out all at once, quick as can be and with little fuss.  
  
(“Ugh, it’s even grosser than last time,” Hudson groaned as they trashed the placenta.  
  
“It really does look like something that shouldn’t be leaving your body,” John agreed with a shudder.)  
  
“Aw,” John chuckled as Hunter squawked and screeched, wriggling and flailing his fists as John balanced him on his lap. “Wow. He’s smaller than Evie was.”  
  
“Oh, I know,” Hudson assured him. “Felt every inch of both of them as they ripped their way out my body.”  
  
“You’re going to be one of those mothers that never lets their kids forget that you had to give birth to them, aren’t you?”  
  
“I think I’ve earned that,” Hudson said, poking her tongue out at him.  
  
After she’d had a chance to clean herself and Hudson up, she let John go to fetch Evie. When she came in, trailed by both John and Burke, she had braids in her hair; they swung back and forth as she hopped up onto the bed beside Hudson and leaned over to examine Hunter.  
  
“Did you do that?” Hudson asked, nodding to Evie.  
  
“Yeah.” Hudson raised her eyebrows at Burke; he glared at her, shrugging defensively. “The hell else am I supposed to do with a five year-old girl? You didn’t leave me an instruction manual!”  
  
“They’re very pretty,” John squeaked, gnawing his lip.  
  
“Thank you for looking after her,” Hudson said sincerely. “I appreciate it, Cameron.”  
  
Burke sniffed. “Yeah, well, she wasn’t so bad.”  
  
“He said he’d let me braid his hair if he had any,” Evie volunteered obliviously.  
  
Hudson snorted loudly, and John clapped a hand over his mouth.  
  
Burke gave them both withering looks, then threw up both hands and left the room. “Alright, I’m out, have fun with the two kids under seven, guys! You’re in for a real blast.”  
  
“Bye Uncle Cameron!” Evie sang.  
  
Hudson and John giggled helplessly.  
  
God, but she was glad to have a family; biological or otherwise.  
  
[---]  
  
Something changed.  
  
It was the sort of change one noticed later, after everything had gone to hell: A slow, subtle change that occurred over time- or at least, that was how it would seem.  
  
In the months after Hunter’s birth, John’s energy began to change; he did everything he did usually, but with less of the usual confidence or verve than he’d had before. He never seemed to have a problem keeping his energy up in the bunker, but now it seemed like he was constantly struggling to maintain enough for day-to-day life. His ability to concentrate had taken a hit too: It seemed he was always losing track of the conversation, distracted by something else.  
  
“John?”  
  
“Mm?”  
  
“I asked if you were going back to the bunker today.”  
  
“Uh…” John stared off into space for a moment, and then shook his head. “I… Yes. Yes I am. I’m going back later today.”  
  
Hudson heard a thousand more interactions just like that when she heard him with his Lieutenants. When asked complicated questions- ‘How many acres do you think we’ll need for the development’, for instance- John took much longer to run the numbers than he would have before. John was a sharp, quick mind, always had been, and it was puzzling to see that mind slow to a crawl apropos of nothing.  
  
If it had _just_ been that, Hudson could have excused it. She could have written it off as John being the father to two young children who demanded much of his time and attention, and was maybe a little more worn out by it than she was.  
  
But it wasn’t just his energy. John seemed to grow increasingly detached from everyone and everything around him- Including Hudson, whom he was closest to after his brothers. She rarely saw him with Joseph, Jacob, or Faith, so it was hard to say if he was acting the same way around them; of course, he had greater incentive to put on a mask when around them than he was anyone else. Whatever the case, John seemed to be trapped in his own head lately. Hudson was hard-pressed to think of the last time he’d genuinely smiled; thankfully for all of them, Evie didn’t know the difference between a real smile and a fake one.  
  
Unfortunately, she _did_ know how to read facial expressions.  
  
“Daddy, are you sad?” Evie asked one night while they were eating.  
  
“No, honey,” John remarked, tone calm but not especially convincing- at least not to Hudson. “I’m fine.”  
  
It wasn’t that Hudson thought he was lying, per se; John didn’t seem sad, at least not to her. But it was obvious that something unusual was going on with him.  
  
“Is everything okay, John?” Hudson asked later on, after the kids were asleep and she was unsettled enough to want the mystery solved.  
  
“Yes,” John responded, maybe a bit too quickly.  
  
“Are you sure?” Hudson pressed, eyeing him the way she used to eye drunk teenagers on the side of the road when they ‘swore to God, like, hand on the bible’ that they had _not_ drank half a tub of gin before getting behind the wheels of their cars. “Because you’re off. You’ve _been_ off for a while. What’s going on? Did something happen?”  
  
John was quiet.  
  
Hudson was patient. She didn’t move and didn’t speak for nearly five minutes as she waited for him to speak, and just as it seemed like she would have to prompt him again, John said:  
  
“If we died, who would you want the kids to stay with?”  
  
Hudson was taken aback at first, uncertain of what to say. But all things considered, it wasn’t such an unusual question given the circumstances. “Uh… Well… Probably Ava and Joseph, if they were okay with it. They have Lydia, so I know they can deal with kids.” Never thought she’d see the day when she’d actually speak the words ‘I would be okay with Joseph Seed taking custody of my children’, but Rook’s presence went a ways to legitimizing the idea.  
  
John nodded, expression curiously passive and unresponsive. “That makes sense.”  
  
He seemed off- sad, even. “It’s no offense to Jacob or Faith,” Hudson said lightly, trying to be funny, “But Faith spends half her time high and Jacob would probably turn them into mini-Rambos.”  
  
John huffed a laugh. “Yeah… Yeah. He would.”  
  
Hudson stared at him. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong, John? Are you sure you’re alright?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“Because you asking me about where our kids would go after we die- that scares me a little.”  
  
“I’m just…” John shrugged lifelessly. “…Thinking about the future. Making sure we have plans.”  
  
Obviously there was more to it than that, but Hudson suspected that she wasn’t going to get anything out of him that day.  
  
Later, she would wish she’d tried harder.  
  
Pushed him more.  
  
Because eventually a night came when John seemed alright- at least in comparison to the last few weeks- and during dinner Hudson found him staring at her almost dreamily.  
  
Hudson smirked a little. “What? Admiring my considerable beauty?”  
  
A beat- and then John smiled weakly, but sincerely. “Yeah.”  
  
He crawled over and kissed her.  
  
The night went well. John seemed a little detached, but not as grim as he’d been in recent days. He took Evie onto his lap and held her for a while, acknowledging her chatter with hums and the occasional monosyllabic response. John seemed more comfortable cuddling her than he did listening, staring off into space that vaguely unsettling way he’d developed a habit of doing. Once Evie got off his lap to go to bed, he picked up Hunter and held him for a while too. Hudson found the behavior odd- especially when they went to bed that night and he seemed to hold her as closely as he’d been holding the kids. “You okay?” Hudson asked, a question she’d been posing _far_ too often lately. She was thinking about asking one of John’s siblings for advice: She’d lived with John for over seven years and she’d never seen him like this before, so it made sense that the next best authority would be someone who’d known him longer and better.  
  
“Yeah,” John sighed, squeezing her tighter and kissing the back of her head. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”  
  
Hudson did, but she’d gotten used to that.  
  
In the morning, John wasn’t in bed.  
  
Hudson felt his absence dimly, the way one does when something that’s usually there is suddenly gone. Hunter began to fuss; they put him in a basket at night, something with a hood that would keep him safe from any predators slinking into their tent looking for an easy meal. John had told Hudson he doubted any of them would, but Hudson insisted because she had no idea what the predators of this new world would do and did _not_ want to be the new world’s version of the ‘ _Dingos took my baby!_ ’ lady. “Alright, alright,” She mumbled, fumbling with the straps on the basket and pulling Hunter out, setting him on her chest. After a minute or two he started to calm down. “Mama’s boy,” Hudson muttered fondly, kissing his head.  
  
She lay like that with Hunter for a while, half-asleep and listening to Evie flop back and forth on her pallet; she always got restless the closer she got to waking up. Hudson ran the schedule for their day through her mind, idly wondering where John had gone. They usually got up at the same time, one of them taking Evie and the other taking Hunter to get them up and dressed. “Where’s daddy?” She mumbled, fingers brushing up and down Hunter’s back. “Hmm?”  
  
Eventually she fell back to sleep.  
  
“Deputy Hudson?”  
  
Hudson’s eyes popped open. The light in the tent was different than it had been before and Evie was sitting up, blanket bunched on her lap. “Mommy,” She yawned, “Mommy, someone wants you.”  
  
“I got it.” Hudson straightened up, carefully setting Hunter down in his basket again. She checked herself as a habit- sleeping outside meant that one kept decently clothed as a matter of practicality- and then forced her stiff and aching limbs to work, hobbling over to the opening of the tent. “Yes?”  
  
Ray, one of the Lieutenants, was standing at the entrance. Isla was with him, and they both looked strangely… Troubled. “Deputy,” Ray rumbled, scratching a hand through the wild beard he’d sported since the Collapse. “If you could… I need you to come with me. Isla can look after your kids.”  
  
Isla smiled weakly- her husband must have been watching their son- and Hudson looked between them with confusion. “What’s going on?”  
  
“Uh-” Ray swallowed. “It’s- It’s John.”  
  
Hudson stiffened; some instinctual little part of her tightened up with dread. “What happened?”  
  
Ray hesitated, mouth open but unable to speak. A few aborted noises made their way from his throat, like the words had started to come and were smothered in a fit of panic. Hudson knew that Ray wasn’t afraid of her, not the way people tended to be afraid of John- so this meant he was trying to say something he thought would upset her.  
  
“I… I think it’s better if you just come and see.”  
  
[---]  
  
John had tried to kill himself.  
  
_Tried_ , thankfully, being the operative word.  
  
Hudson swayed in place, and Ray quickly reached out to steady her. “I’m fine,” She said faintly, the words sounding distant and small over the blood rushing in her ears. “I’m… I’m fine.” Her head whipped back towards the tent, where Isla was with the kids; they were too far away for Evie to have heard, thank Christ.  
  
_John tried to kill himself._  
  
_John tried to end his life._  
  
_John attempted **suicide.**_  
  
“What…” Hudson stopped herself. No point in asking Ray or anyone else why John had done it- they likely had as much of an idea as she did, that being none. Hell, they were probably waiting for _her_ to offer up an explanation as to why he might have done it. Hudson was basically his wife, after all.  
  
“Where is he?”  
  
“In the infirmary. I’ll take you.”  
  
The longer she meditated on it, the worse the situation became. In the pre-Collapse world John would be in a hospital, would probably be held for a few days while the doctors determined if he was going to make another attempt. He’d probably be prescribed anti-depressants, recommended to a psychologist- and if they didn’t, Hudson would have grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to one anyway. He would eventually go home, become the subject of the usual small-town gossip for a while, and things would go from there.  
  
But it wasn’t the pre-Collapse world. There was no medication, no therapy, and while Hudson had never been explicitly briefed on Eden’s Gate’s view on suicide, she figured it was about the same as most other Christian denominations. Maybe she was wrong- maybe they’d regard it the way they regarded homosexuality, with a sort of ‘eh, whatever’ air- but Hudson wasn’t inclined to think John was lucky enough for that to be the case.  
  
If it wasn’t, John was going to have the hammer brought down on him for being depressed and anxious.  
  
For the first time in years, Hudson might have to kick some Peggie ass.  
  
Once again, she descended into the bunker. Hudson didn’t know if they’d brought John here because of the severity of his injuries (Ray said he’d cut his wrists, so maybe they’d had the good sense to bring him someplace clean) or because they’d been attempting to give him a measure of privacy, but she was grateful regardless; the bunker mostly had a skeleton-crew, and that meant less people to feed into the grapevine.  
  
When she approached the infirmary, Hudson was surprised to find Jacob standing outside, speaking with one of the doctors. He did a double-take when he saw her, breaking away from the doctor and walking towards her. “He’s alright,” Jacob said. “I mean, inasmuch as he can be. He’s alive, and he’s not gonna die.”  
  
Hudson let out a shaky breath. “ _Fuck_. Thank fuck.”  
  
Jacob shook his head, scratching his fingers through his hair. “No kidding. This time I thought he’d really managed it.”  
  
Hudson froze. “‘This time’?” She echoed.  
  
Jacob frowned. “Shit. I thought he told you. Not like he keeps his mouth shut about the other shitty parts of his past.”  
  
“He’s done this _before?_ ”  
  
“Yeah.” Jacob sighed and held out his right arm, running his finger up and down the inside of it. “The SLOTH tattoo he has, right here? With the line through it? He did that about a year after we got to Hope County. No fuckin’ idea what brought it on: He told us he never tried to kill himself before. Just said he got really low and couldn’t take it anymore.”  
  
Hudson was quiet for a moment. “How… How did you two react?”  
  
The fact that Jacob didn’t seem more offended by that question was disheartening. “Well, I changed John’s diapers as a baby and I don’t plan on burying him, so I was pretty freaked out.”  
  
“And Joseph?”  
  
“Joseph…” Jacob heaved a much heavier sigh this time. “…He was disappointed that John didn’t reach out to us. He may have gotten a little lecture-y. Once I got him alone I told him to tone down the fucking Jesus-shit for five minutes so John wouldn’t neck himself again; I think that might’ve been the worst fight we’d ever had.”  
  
Hudson let out a low, disbelieving chuckle. “‘Tone down the Jesus-shit’? Jacob Seed, that is positively _blasphemous._ ”  
  
“I did not give a single fuck, and I still don’t.” He paused. “Wasn’t sure about you for a while, Deputy-”  
  
“Just call me Joey.”  
  
“…Joey. I wasn’t sure about you at first. I kinda feel like Rook and Burke have been taken in to Joseph’s way of thinking a little bit- or if they haven’t, they’re at least taken in by his charisma enough that they’ll go along with him. But you… You seem like you’ve kept your head with John. You’re doing what you have to without any of the religious fluff. That’s good- John will need someone with their head screwed on straight to help him get through this.”  
  
“Thanks, Jacob. I… Appreciate that.” Hudson rubbed her eyes. “Are you going to tell Joseph about this?”  
  
Jacob was quiet for a long moment. He rolled his jaw contemplatively. “Don’t know yet.” John had (unintentionally) implied on a few occasions that Jacob was not as fanatical as his siblings, particularly where his devotion to Joseph was concerned, and right now Hudson was grateful for it.  
  
“You think he’d be upset?”  
  
Jacob snorted. “Of course he’d be upset. John’s our brother.” He paused. “If you mean ‘would he be angry’ for doing this again, especially after promising he wouldn’t last time, then… I don’t know. Joseph’s not as predictable as all that. Depends entirely on what that fuckin’ voice whispers in his ear.”  
  
“He’d really let _God_ tell him to dump on his brother for trying to kill himself?”  
  
“Trust me,” Jacob grunted darkly. “It’s not the first time that fucking voice told him to do something awful.” Guess he didn’t know she knew about Joseph’s first daughter. “Of course, now that I think about it, I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to keep it from him. A few people in this camp already know what John did to himself, so some well-meaning idiot will send it back to Joseph in the spirit of ‘helping’. He’ll hear about it eventually, and he’ll be twice as pissy that we kept it from him.”  
  
“It might be worth it if John has a chance to collect himself before getting the hammer brought down on his head.”  
  
“You’re not wrong.” Jacob heaved another sigh and waved a hand at her. “You, you go be with John. If Joseph asks, you were so overwrought with concern that you never even thought to contact him. I’ll figure out a plan of action in the meantime.”  
  
“Thank you, Jacob.”  
  
Hudson hesitated, but then stepped forward and embraced Jacob. He returned it sincerely, if not especially affectionately, with a tight squeeze and a pat on the back. “You’re welcome.”  
  
Jacob left.  
  
Hudson took a deep breath, and then stepped into the infirmary.  
  
[---]  
  
John was asleep.  
  
He looked half-dead, pale and sickly. For a moment Hudson thought his breathing was slower than it ought to be, but a moment’s observation calmed her; it wasn’t any slower than was reasonable. Both of his forearms were bandaged, the white cloth unmarred; so he’d slit his wrists. _Sideways for attention, lengthwise for results_ , Hudson remembered some girls sing-songing in high school, about some other girl who’d gone and supposedly tried to kill herself. It had been a cruel little phrase to undermine whatever that girl had tried to do, and it had made Hudson sick to her stomach to hear them mocking her for it; now it came back to Hudson and all she could think was,  
  
_Well, it seems John wanted results._  
  
She felt as sick now as she had back then.  
  
For a moment Hudson stared at him, uncertain as to what she should do. After a moment she found a chair and pulled it over quietly, sitting down at his side. She made no noise, but a second later John started as though Hudson had started clapping her hands next to his head. “Joey?” He croaked, trying to rise up on his elbows and grimacing roughly at the strain it put on the damaged skin beneath the bandages. Assuming John had really been trying, at least one of the cuts had to be serious enough for stitches.  
  
“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” Hudson said quickly. “Don’t hurt yourself.”  
  
John laid back and stared up at her, eyes dark. He didn’t speak.  
  
Hudson didn’t either.  
  
They spent a solid five minutes in silence, Hudson waiting and John reluctant. “Well?” She said finally, voice a little shaky. She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. _Don’t blame him. Don’t make him think you’re angry. Keep it cool._ “What happened? Why did you do this? Why… Just _why_ , John?”  
  
John stared at her a while longer and didn’t answer. Hudson kept breathing and told herself that maybe he couldn’t right now, maybe he didn’t even know why he’d done it, maybe she’d get some shtick about sin-  
  
“I deserved it.”  
  
Hudson’s eyes popped open. “What?”  
  
“I deserve it,” John rasped. “I do. A while back… I had Evie. You were with Rook- right after Hunter was born. And she asked me how we met.”  
  
Hudson’s eyes fluttered shut. “Oh.”  
  
“Yeah… _Oh_. She started talking about how Lydia said her parents met when they had to hide together during the Collapse. Simple enough, don’t know how long it took Joseph or Rook to come up with that palatable little story, but I sure as _fuck_ didn’t know how to make what happened with us sound so nice. ‘Daddy dragged mommy into the bunker and tortured her with an ice-pick and a hammer until she cried’ isn’t exactly something you can make into a fairytale!” John’s voice cracked and crumbled. “Fuck. _Fuck,_ Joey, it took my fucking _five year-old_ asking me how we got together to make me realize how completely fucked up this all is.” He covered his face. “I obsessed over it for so long and I just… I couldn’t live with it, Joey. How am I supposed to live with myself? How can I live with myself, knowing what I did to my child’s _mother?_ What does that say about me? What does that _make_ me?”  
  
This was a conversation Hudson had never really imagined having with John. He was so utterly devoted to Joseph, and he’d never shown any real signs of wavering from that devotion before now- if anything, she’d assumed they’d finally have a blowout over Hudson’s _lack_ of devotion to Joseph, over their children being asked to worship their uncle as a prophet of God. She wasn’t entirely sure what to say: On one hand, it was good that he recognized how fucked up the situation was, and it was good that he was acknowledging that he’d done her a serious wrong.  
  
On the other hand, Hudson didn’t want him _killing himself_ over it.  
  
“I don’t know,” She said finally.  
  
“Do you hate me? Be honest,” John begged. “Don’t… Don’t hold back. I need to know the truth, good or bad. Do you hate me for what I did to you? Do you regret being with me like this? Having kids with me?”  
  
“No!” Hudson exclaimed. “I mean- No, I don’t regret our kids, I never will, and no, I don’t…” She hesitated, and then sighed. “Look. Am I _happy_ about the fact that you kidnapped me and tortured me until I confessed my ‘sins’? No, no I’m not. If the Collapse hadn’t happened I probably would have found a way to bash your head in and escape.”  
  
“That’s fair,” John said softly.  
  
“It is,” Hudson agreed bluntly. “But… Shit, John, I don’t- You _stopped_. I know Joseph _made_ you stop, and I know you’ve got a god-awful temper, but once you stopped, you _stopped._ You didn’t torture me, you didn’t hurt me, and that’s why I got close to you. If you’d ever fucking laid a hand on me after the torture stopped I would’ve gone right back to hating your guts. But you didn’t, so…” She shrugged. “I kinda got to liking you after a while. Guess I love you a little, too.”  
  
“Do you? You’re not still angry?”  
  
“I don’t see any point in holding onto it. Too much has happened since then. Being bitter wouldn’t help me, or you, or the kids. As long as you never lay a hand on me- or _them_ \- ever again, I… I guess I’m okay to leave it behind.”  
  
“I won’t.” John rubbed the bandages on his left arm. “I couldn’t. It wasn’t just Joseph. I mean, with _you_ , anyway. You were interesting, and eventually I got to trusting you, and you never did anything to make me regret trusting you, so I started to like you.” He paused. “I don’t connect with people well.”  
  
Hudson snorted. “You don’t say?”  
  
John laughed hoarsely. “Yeah. I never have. But you, you I connected with. I treat people differently when I’ve connected with them.”  
  
“That’s fucked up, John.”  
  
“I know. I’ve always kind of known _that_ , but the rest…” John shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know why it took me until now to get it.”  
  
“Some people lose their minds when they have kids. Guess yours just had the opposite effect on you.” She sighed again. “Look, we’ve… We’ve got a lot of shit in our pasts. What’s done is done. You’ve been a good… Well- husband, basically, and you’ve been a good father to the kids.” Hudson remembered, and invoked, Rook’s take on it. “At this point, even if I still didn’t like you it’d do more bad than good to separate from you. It would hurt the kids more than it would help.” She eyed him. “And fortunately, I don’t have to worry about that, because I do love you.”  
  
John let out a long, shaky breath. “I love you too.”  
  
Hudson squeezed his arm. “This,” She gestured to his arms, “Needs to never happen again. I don’t care if you’ve gotta start dosing your coffee with Bliss, or if I have to follow you around twenty-four hours a day, but- I saw the signs and I didn’t move fast enough, and this isn’t happening again. If you need forgiveness from me to keep surviving, then you have it. But… Christ, John, don’t do this to the kids.”  
  
“Okay,” John said quickly, “Okay-”  
  
“ _No_ ,” Hudson said insistently. “Don’t make a promise you’re not sure you can keep. I’m not dumping on you, or blaming you, just- the next time you think you might want to do something like this, _please_ remember that we want you here.”  
  
John nodded, subdued. “Okay.”  
  
“And…” Hudson licked her lips, looked away, and then back to John. “Listen to me: I know you love Joseph. I know you respect him. But he is not always one-hundred percent right. If he tells you that you were, I don’t know, morally or spiritually wrong for wanting to do this…” She shook her head emphatically. “He’s wrong, okay?”  
  
John’s expression was largely inscrutable, but Hudson saw something there that she could almost describe as… Defeat. Relenting.  
  
“Okay,” he whispered.  
  
Jesus fucking Christ, he had accepted that Joseph wasn’t always right.  
  
Glory hallelujah, praise Jesus, God is good, whatever the fuck it was Hudson was supposed to say or think.  
  
“Get some rest,” She said. “I’m not going anywhere.”  
  
John slept.  
  
And Hudson did stay. There were things to do, and the metaphorical weight of them made her head feel physically heavy: She had to get the kids from Isla, she had to reconnect with Jacob, and she had to make sure Joseph didn’t do more harm than good to his brother. And from now on, she needed to keep an eye on John. There was no point in denying now that she wanted him around for as long as possible.  
  
But for right now, Hudson just wanted to stay with John and sleep.  
  
She could deal with anything and everything else later.  
  
-End


End file.
